Study Tip #7
TEACHING YOURSELF COGNITIVE SKILLS

• Example: to learn a math procedure, you may read the textbook and listen to your instructor. You may study a worked-out example or just jump in and try the problem. As you try problems, you will go slowly, refer back to the directions and the worked examples, and get feedback from the textbook’s right answers.
• Example: To learn how to write essays that make an argument, you may read directions and then study a couple of essays that are models of good arguments. Then you may write an essay yourself and look back at the directions and the models and compare your essay to them.

Continuing to learn: the associative stage. 

You will begin to detect mistakes and eliminate them. You will begin to associate the various steps to each other; you will change from doing steps one-by-one and begin to group them into chunks of several steps that you can do in one unit. You will begin to remember the steps and to learn shortcuts. Your speed and accuracy will improve. This stage may also take a few minutes or a few hours.

Continuing to learn: the autonomous stage. 

As you continue to practice the skill, you will continue to improve your speed and accuracy. You will be able to act more automatically. You will be able to do the skilled tasks with less concentration. This stage may go on for months and years.

Long learning time is needed for skills. 

People need much longer to develop skills than to learn ordinary factual knowledge. One psychologist noted that students learning one skill needed to practice about 40 times with each new step. It takes people additional time to integrate a series of steps into a smooth procedure. In contrast, in ideal circumstances people can learn a new chunk of knowledge in less than 10 seconds. That means you should plan to do a lot of practice when learning skills.

Teach yourself the goals, situations and actions for each step of a cognitive skill.

First, each step will have its own goal or subgoal that helps signals what to do. For example, when you learned to add several columns of numbers, you learned a series of goals: to add first the right column, then the next left column, then the next left, and so on. You also learned goals for handling subtotals that add up to more than 10 and to carry 1 or 2 or 3 or more to the next left column. 

Second, you must teach yourself to recognize situations that also govern what to do. Consider the different situations when adding numbers: having just added the first number in the rightmost column, having added a middle number, being finished with a column, having written down one-digit for the subtotal, having a number to carry versus not having a number to carry, having a second column to add, and so on. Consider a basketball game: part of a player’s skill is to look at the changing patterns of what the other players are doing as situations to recognize. Learn situations as part of your skill learning.

Finally, learn what action to take for each combination of situations and goals. Situation-goal-action.

As you read directions for doing a task or as you study a worked-out example, break down each step into its three elements: the situation, the goal, and the action to take. If you are listening to a teacher who just says, “Do this, do that, do that,” you will learn better if you ask the teacher to point out the situations and goals that govern each step. 

Study worked-out examples. 

Don’t just read directions and ignore the examples. Worked-out examples are powerful. Research demonstrates that people who study worked-out examples in math and other subjects can use them as models for their own attempts to do the skill. When you find that a type of problem or skill is complex and that you confuse it with other skills, it is helpful to memorize a worked-out example. Later, when you encounter a similar problem, you can use the memorized example to reteach yourself what to do.

Get feedback. 

When you practice a skill, it is vital to know how well you are doing. Get answers for problems you solve and get expert reactions to your creative work and get a teacher’s evaluation of lab work and use of tools. Why? By getting feedback, you will correct mistakes before your practice hardens them into bad habits.

Summarize. 

When you finish a task successfully, pause a minute, make a mental summary of the steps you followed. Ignore the false starts and mistakes you made. Just summarize the right series of steps. Your purpose is to remember the general pattern of steps you went through so that you can go faster the next time you encounter that task.

Congratulate yourself and feel good for using the technique that led to success. 

In addition, when you finish a task, you can also boost your memory by reinforcing yourself. Give yourself praise, tell yourself you did a good job, and call up a positive feeling.

What should you reinforce yourself for? Praise yourself for doing the procedure well. Don’t think just about success. Think about how you used a good technique to bring success. Think cause and effect.

Why? What is the purpose? Why not just stay neutral in your feelings and go on to the next task? The reason is that one way our minds learn is by repeating actions that lead to pleasure and by avoiding actions that lead to pain. It seems probable that when we feel positive emotion after doing a skill and getting success, our brains create “long-term potentiation” between the neurons involved, and that increases the permanence of the learning.

Space out your practice. 

Research on learning skills has demonstrated that students who spread out their practice sessions, instead of concentrating them into just a few sessions, do not need as much time to build up their skill to good levels of speed and accuracy. One researcher used sessions of 30 minutes twice a day over four days. People training dyslexic readers use 10 to 15 minute sessions daily for periods of months and find it works. This fact means that, unlike learning ordinary knowledge, you cannot put off learning skills until a cram session at the end of the term just before final exams.

Trouble-shoot mistakes by changing chunk size. 

Some of our mistakes and slow performance are influenced because we try to learn too many skill steps at once. If so, learn and practice less at a time.

• Break down a group of steps into smaller units. Analyze and practice just one step at a time.
• When even one step with its linkage of situation-goal-action is too much to wrap your mind around at once, break it apart and study first to recognize the situation, then to identify the goal of that step, and finally to drill yourself to see that situation-goal pair and respond with the action.
• When even that is too much, break each of those units apart and study them separately.
• Practice very slowly.
• When learned habitual mistakes occur, practice slowly and away from competition and pressure. Use much extra practice to break bad habits.

On the other hand, some of our mistakes and slowness come because we have not grouped together the steps of a new skill into larger units.

• Practice doing several steps together quickly.
• Get the feel of flowing with several steps.

Different subjects have different learning techniques. 

Various games, sports, subjects and professions have developed individual learning methods. Pay attention to them. Use them. They can add to the general techniques that were described in this study tip.

(Dan Hodges. 7/07)

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