VII. Principle 4: Drill Flashcards
Why are drills important in ultralearning?
Drills are important because our weak points limit our ability to perform a task in its entirety.
Drills allow us to focus on the rate-determining step, the weakest link in the chain, to allow us to improve faster overall.
In ultralearning, what is the tension between principle 3 (directness) and principle 4 (Drill)?
Directness says to learn in context as much as possible.
Drilling says to slice the task apart and focus on individual elements at a more granular level.
How can the tension between directness and drilling be addressed in ultralearning?
What are the 3 steps to this process?
The direct-then-drill approach.
- Practice the skill directly
- Analyse the direct skill and isolate the things you need to work on, including elements that you can’t focus on directly because there’s too much going on.
Drill these components.
- Go back to direct practice and integrate the learning. Look out for transfer difficulties and possible improvements with your drill design.
How fast should the direct-then-drill cycle be when you are starting to ultralearn a skill?
What about when you become more advanced?
Initially, it should be a very quick cycle.
Once you become an expert, you can spend more time detouring into drills, as your awareness of the individual components of the overall skill become more detailed and improvement becomes harder.
What are the 3 main problems when designing drills in ultralearning?
- Figuring out when and what to drill. (ie what are the rate-determining factors?)
- Designing an effective drill
- Drills are often hard and uncomfortable.
In ultralearning, what are the 5 tactics for creating effective drills?
- Time slicing
- Cognitive components
- The Copycat
- The Magnifying Glass method
- Prerequisite Chaining
In ultralearning drilling, what is an example of time slicing?
Going over a particular difficult short passage of music and getting that to a certain level before integrating it in with the rest of the piece.
What is the point of both the Cognitive Components and Copycat tactics for drilling in Ultralearning?
The point is to be able to isolate particular components of the skill to focus on in the drill, without having to worry about the other components for the time being.
What are some examples of splitting up language learning into different Cognitive Components for the purposes of drilling?
What is an example of how to isolate one cognitive component?
Could work on the following independently:
- Pronunciation
- Listening comprehension
- Writing & spelling
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
For example, when focusing on pronunciation, you can read the words of cards, and not worry about identifying the meaning of the word, or having to remember it in the first place.
What is The Copycat tactic for drilling in Ultralearning?
To copy the elements of the skill that you don’t want to drill so you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice.
You can just as easily copy from others or your past work.
What is the Magnifying Glass tactic for drilling in Ultralearning?
What is an example?
Spend more time than usual on the particular element of the task that you want to drill.
E.g. Spending a whole day working on the drums of a piece of music, instead of an hour.
What is Prerequisite Chaining in ultralearning?
Starting by performing the skill that you don’t have all the prerequisites for, and then going backwards to improve your apparent weaknesses and fill any gaps.
When is the Magnifying Glass tactic particularly useful?
What is the immediate downside of this tactic in ultralearning?
When it is difficult to slice an element of a skill out from the rest.
The downside is it demands an increase in input time, and may reduce your overall performance initially. Over the long run, this hardly matters.
