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This semester, I enrolled in a ballroom dance class to fulfill a credit requirement. For me, this was a very new skill that I had no prior experience in. Although it was only an introductory level class, I struggled immensely during the first few weeks of the class. Specifically, we began the course learning some of steps in Box rhythm. After a couple weeks of practice, we then had a graded dance practical in the Box rhythm. Being a 1-credit course, I did not put in much effort outside of class at first. Then, with first practical right around the corner, I realized how unprepared I was. Across those next few days, I spent about 2-3 hours each day practicing the steps of the dance practical. This is an example of using massed practice, or practice with relatively short rest periods between sessions. On the day of the practical, I did not perform as well as I would have liked because I was unable to correctly remember all the steps I had practiced. In order to perform better on the future practical’s, I had a much different approach to the distribution and the amount of practice I was completing.

Moreover, I made the decision to use distributed practice to help my retention on the other practical’s. The opposite of massed practice, distributed practice utilizes relatively long rest periods between each session. So, on the Monday, Wednesday and Saturday of each week, I spent 30-45 minutes outside of class practicing the steps for the new dance unit. I was able to space my practice out over a much longer period of time. This allowed me to keep each practice session shorter and to have more time between each day of practice. When the time came for the next practical, I was much better prepared. I was able to retain nearly all of the proper mechanics for the dance. Comparatively, I scored higher on my dance practical when I used distributed practice instead of massed practice. Similar conclusions were first made in the Baddeley and Longman (1978) experiment where postal workers were evaluated on their ability to use the mail-sorting machine  after undergoing different distributions and amounts of practice. Baddeley and Longman also found that distributed practice was much better for improving and retaining motor skills. Just like how it impacted my practical performance in ballroom dance class this spring.

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While growing up, one of my favorite sports to participate in was football. However, the tackle football program in my area was provided for kids 5th grade and up. So, I was forced to participate in flag football leagues from kindergarten to 4th grade. Although the game of flag football and tackle football are essentially the same, the physical nature of tackle is much more demanding. I was a talented player who had a good grasp on how to perform a lot of the different skills utilized in football. But when the time comes for tackle football, some kids cannot find the aggression to want to hit people while others may not be able to take the brunt of the hits. My dad wanted to ensure that I was ready for the physicality of tackle football when I was finally able to play. Thus, he signed me up for wrestling in 2nd grade to help with the transition from flag to tackle football. In doing so, it demonstrates some of the main principles regarding the transfer of learning.

Along with the physicality of the two sports, wrestling uses a lot of the same mechanics and techniques that are essential in the game of football. For example, when performing a take-down in wrestling; you get low, reach in and wrap your arms around your opponent’s legs, and you drive them down to the mat. Similarly, when performing a tackle in football, all of the same mechanics are used. In becoming more accustomed to the proper techniques I learned from take-downs in wrestling, the learning positively transferred to my skills in football. Positive transfer refers to this beneficial effect of previous experience on learning or performance of another skill. Ultimately, I was able to take the aspects I learned for performing a good take-down in wrestling and use it when learning how to properly tackle someone in football. In having prior experience in wrestling, I was much more skilled and farther ahead of the learning curve compared to many of my teammates in making good tackles.

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Growing up, I would visit my grandparents with my cousins quite often. During these long visits, there wasn’t a lot of things a child could do for fun. Aside from playing games outside and watching some TV, I really had nothing else to do. I started to notice that one of grandmother’s favorite activities was to hand sew during her free time. She would hand sew such beautiful scarfs, hats, sweaters, etc. that I became interested in how she could do that. Since I was running out of funs things to do, I asked her about hand sewing one day. Inevitably, she ended up getting super excited that I had taken notice to her hobby and she wanted to teach me and one of my cousins. My grandmother had a beginners sewing board that she had me start working on. However, she was unaware of the challenge ahead of her. My fine motor skills were inept as I struggled immensely to sew efficiently. I kept making mistakes and having to re-work the yarn so after a while, I eventually gave up. Meanwhile, my cousin who is a girl but is the same age as me, had flourished with her hand sewing. She was able to sew much more intricate and detailed things than I could. After looking back on my attempts to hand sew, I now better understand why I had some of these difficulties with sewing.

There are individual differences in the way people perform various tasks. More specifically, individual differences refer to some definable trait that can be measure in people such as age, gender, weight, etc. It distinguishes traits that are more beneficial to the execution of a certain skill. Hand sewing utilizes mainly the fingers and hand movements to execute the skill. The manual dexterity required in sewing signifies that it is characteristic of a fine motor skill. With that being said, Thomas, Nelson, and Church (1991) examined the difference between genders in almost any task imaginable. They found that women tended to outperform men when it came to tasks that require rapid manipulation of fine motor skills. Due to my gender, I am not nearly as well suited in activities that require fine motor skills like sewing. Furthermore, my cousin was able to manipulate her hands and fingers much more rapidly and efficiently than me. Which alludes to one of the reasons why I struggled so much with the skill of hand sewing and why she was able to do much better.

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Another sport I used to play while growing up was basketball. From a very young age, my father was quite involved with my basketball teams, and he was often one of the coaches. The skills that are utilized in basketball like dribbling and shooting require precise and distinct movements of various parts of the body. Even if one element of the skill is not done with proper technique, it can negatively affect the outcome of the action. My father was very vocal coach, often yelling at me to get a teaching point across. With that being said, during one of my years of playing competitive basketball, I noticed that my shots were hardly falling. I couldn’t figure out the part of my jump shot that was incorrect and I kept shooting poorly as a result. That is until my father uncovered the flaw and provided me with feedback to fix my shot.

Augmented feedback refers to supplemental information added to inherent feedback from a source external to the person doing the task. In my case, my father was the one providing augmented feedback. Specifically, he was critiquing my performance when I wasn’t shooting the basketball correctly. I wasn’t getting the necessary spin on the ball when I was releasing it. Particularly, my dad told me I needed to focus on “reaching my hand into the cookie jar” every time I flicked my right wrist to shoot. With his feedback in mind, I adjusted my motor skills to make sure I was putting the right spin on the ball. I slowed down the speed of my shot a little and focused my attention on “reaching into the cookie jar”. After I was able to grasp this skill, I noticed that my shot was much more consistent.

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7:50 seems a little early for a class, right? Every Tuesday and Thursday of my freshman year of college, I dragged myself out of bed and headed over to my Anatomy Physiology lecture. A barrage of nonstop information about the human body came my way for an hour and 15 straight minutes. All the detailed information about the complex structures and systems of the body made me feel distraught and confused. I left each lecture wondering how I was going to remember all of this information I just "learned." To do this, I have to transfer said knowledge from short term to long term memory.

Short term memory refers to the storage of roughly 7 +/- 2 items in the brain for a limited amount of time. So, you can see how this may be a problem being that I had what felt like infinite amounts of anatomy and physiology information to remember come exam time. I had to consolidate my short-term knowledge into long term memory storage. This takes roughly 24-72 hours and requires changing of synaptic connections. By revisiting the information in the days following the  lectures, I could store as much anatomy and physiology as possible in my long-term memory. And I was able to retrieve and recall a lot more of this knowledge on the exam and do better as a result.