Three kinds of practice and how they relate to alternative grading

What kinds of practice are we encouraging or discouraging through our grading?

Photo by Karl Solano on Unsplash

Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring the connections between practice and grading systems. In my first post about this, I went into some depth about deliberate practice and how it connects to the feedback loops that we find at the heart of the Four Pillars framework. Then in a follow-up I unpacked a research paper that addressed the question of how to motivate students to practice. My takeaway in both articles is that alternative grading systems set students up to be motivated and to actually engage in deliberate practice on the things they are learning. So there is a mutually supportive relationship between deliberate practice and alternative grading.

But it turns out there’s more to deliberate practice than I was letting on in these two articles. And today I wanted to look at different kinds of practice, including but not limited to deliberate practice, and think about when those different kinds of practice are appropriate and how alternative grading connects to each.

Types of practice

“Practice”, generally speaking, just refers to repeatedly rehearsing a behavior. There are at least three ways that this can be done, depending on the details of the rehearsal and the goals of the person practicing.

Naive practice is practice where someone simply does an activity repeatedly, with the assumed belief that repetition leads to mastery but otherwise with no real trajectory, goals, or outside help in mind. Naive practice is characterized as being on autopilot versus being engaged and concentrating on improvement. Naive practice typically also lacks structure and leads to the “arrested development plateau”, where although repetition will lead to improvement for a time, at a certain point, no further repetition leads to any further improvement. In fact, one’s skills may deteriorate over time, even with further repetition.

Naive practice isn’t necessarily bad or wrong, it is just one way to practice a skill, and for some skills naive practice is appropriate. For example, if you are a driver learning how to commute to a new job, naive practice would involve simply driving that commute every single workday for as long as you’re in the job. At first you may struggle to find your way to your workplace, but with repetition – and repetition is all that’s needed – you will get good enough at it. There’s no real value in “mastering” your commute, so naive practice is just fine.

Purposeful practice, by contrast, involves more intention. Purposeful practice is distinguished from naive practice in that it has well-defined specific goals that break a complex skill down into manageable chunks. The person doing purposeful practice is fully engaged and concentrates hard to push toward those goals. Purposeful practice also involves immediate informative feedback on the performance toward those mini skills that lead to the higher goal, and a strong element of getting outside one’s comfort zone.

If simply repeating your commute over and over every day is naive practice for learning a commute, then purposeful practice would be like working through a specialized self-paced course to master a driving skill like parallel parking. There is a particular goal in mind (to be able to parallel park a car) broken down into manageable bite-sized pieces (for example being able to back into a space). Practicing those skills involves concentration, effort, discomfort, making mistakes, and learning from mistakes.

And that gets us to deliberate practice. Deliberate practice includes all of the hallmarks of purposeful practice, but adds two extra ingredients. First is the presence of expert guidance. Whereas purposeful practice is typically self-directed, deliberate practice in almost every instance requires the presence of an expert coach, teacher, or guide whose job is to design activities customized for each student and targeting the specific needs of those students. Secondly, and related to the first, deliberate practice is only really possible in mature fields of study where the pathways to mastery are well established, and can therefore be taught.

To continue the driving analogy, suppose that instead of a self-paced course in parallel parking, you are in a driver’s ed course that teaches parallel parking (among many other things). Here you have a driving instructor who can give you classroom instruction as well as individualized coaching as they sit in the passenger seat while you actually attempt a parallel park. And parallel parking is an activity that is well established enough to have what amounts to a single correct way to practice – even if the instructor does give you personalized lessons. In this case, you are performing deliberate practice, not just purposeful practice.

When does deliberate practice fail?

The differences between purposeful practice and deliberate practice are important, because they tell us that there are some fields in which deliberate practice may not be possible in a strict sense. And in some cases, not even all of the defining characteristics of purposeful practice can be met.

For example, consider the domain of entrepreneurship. Many universities have academic programs in entrepreneurship, but deliberate practice in being an entrepreneur is highly limited. Practicing being an entrepreneur involves starting a business, or simulating it. Many of the aspects of purposeful practice are available: One can set well-defined specific goals (“Write a business plan by the end of the month”; “Become profitable by the end of the year”) and break those down into small pieces. It requires engagement and concentration and certainly involves discomfort.

But getting immediate informative feedback on entrepreneurship is hard. The feedback that one gets as an entrepreneur is often informative but not immediate. You might not be able to get actionable feedback on your plans for making a business profitable until the end-of-year deadline has passed. Other times, feedback is immediate but not informative, for example when someone unfamiliar with the full scope of your business tries to give advice on large-scale matters. Additionally, the field of entrepreneurship is not mature in the sense that there is currently no established pathway towards being a good entrepreneur (despite the profusion of books that claim otherwise), nor is it a straightforward process to hire a good entrepreneurship teacher to give you customized exercises.

These systemic constraints on domains such as entrepreneurship place an upper limit on just how intense or intentional practice can be. In fields where immediate informative feedback is problematic, or in which expert guidance is scarce, or in which the domain itself is not mature enough to have standard approaches to mastery, purposeful practice is just about all we can hope for and deliberate practice may not be possible. This is partly why many people consider domains like entrepreneurship, but also including domains like leadership or even teaching itself, to be hard to master because they are hard to practice.

Practice and the Four Pillars

Deliberate practice is considered the gold standard, but is not necessarily the right goal in mind for all forms of instruction in higher education. It’s probably best to say that our aim in higher education should be purposeful practice at minimum and any portion of deliberate practice when possible. And this is where our grading systems in classes can come into play.

You probably heard echoes of the four pillars as I was describing purposeful and deliberate practice above. But here is how I see the connections between these forms of practice and the four pillars more explicitly.

• Having well-defined specific goals that break a complex skill down into manageable chunks is the very essence of the first pillar, Clearly Defined Standards.

• I’ve mentioned “immediate informative feedback” a couple of times already, and this is obviously related to pillar number two, Helpful Feedback. I’ve often framed the word “helpful” here as meaning feedback that invites students to continue participating in the feedback loop. But viewed from the lens of practice, “helpful” has more detailed connotations. First, it should be immediate, which I don’t take to mean instantaneous, but simply given to the learner while the experience is still fresh, and the fresher the better. And it should be informative, which means being honest and clear about what the learner/practicer is doing well and what is missing from mastery. The clarity of that feedback also appears, if indirectly, in the third pillar, Marks that Indicate Progress.

• And it goes without saying that the fourth pillar, reattempts without penalty, must be in place, otherwise we’re not practicing at all, because there was no repeated rehearsal of the behavior.

Other elements of purposeful and deliberate practice do not directly connect into the four pillars, but are addressed by them or are a combination of them. For example, purposeful practice involves getting outside one’s comfort zone. I phrased this earlier by saying that deliberate practice is often deeply uncomfortable – sometimes boring, exhausting, and not very fun.

In my experience, alternative grading definitely pushes students out of their comfort zones because the expectation is that you will not just earn enough points to pass the class, but actually master the content of the class through confronting your mistakes, learning from feedback on those, and repeatedly reattempting until the standard is met. This is a profoundly uncomfortable process. It’s much more comfortable to live in a world where if you do poorly on one quiz you just have to do extra well on the next, and the averages will take care of the rest. It’s the kind of discomfort that we sometimes call desirable difficulty: Discomfort that means real learning is taking place.

Also not directly addressed by the pillars, but baked into most of our contexts where we use alternative grading, are ourselves as the instructors. Students can engage in self-directed practice, which would by definition not be “deliberate”. Perhaps this is what many of our students do when they’re not in class. The way that instructors can elevate students’ practice from “just” purposeful, to deliberate is by inserting themselves into the picture.

This is the domain of class activities. I have mentioned before that when we talk about “clearly defined standards”, the word clear doesn’t refer simply to the language that’s being used, but the alignment of the standards to what happens in the classroom and then to what happens on assessments. Standards are truly clearly defined when they are stated simply and given as specific goals that are broken down into manageable chunks, but then also instantiated through active learning in the classroom¹.

What kind of practice do we want?

Every grading system supports some kind of practice methodology. The only question is which kind.

Traditional grading – with an emphasis on points, percentages, and statistics instead of feedback loops – is optimized for naive practice. The hallmarks of purposeful and deliberate practice we described above may sometimes be present in traditional grading, but they are not the default, and traditional grading neither encourages nor supports any form of practice beyond the naive.

Alternative grading practices, on the other hand, set students up for success through high quality purposeful or deliberate practice. This is true whatever the particular flavor or combination of flavors one may be using, as long as they are based on the four pillars. These skills can be instantiated and learned so as to be useful across one’s whole lifetime.

1. Including asynchronous modalities, which admit active learning of a different sort.]