The Benefits of Random Practice in Skill Acquisition

Matthew Syed asked an interesting question on twitter about trials conducted on skill acquisition in sport that got me searching the topic. I came across a The Shea and Morgan experiment, that showed the benefits of random practice over blocked repetitive practice in learning skills relating to a discipline, such as sports.

This got me thinking back to my post about the drastic decrease of ‘artists’ and individualists in football, most specifically the part about the role of academies in player development in modern football, and also, the lack of self-learning football on the street or in the park.

The research clearly shows that ‘random practice’ is far more effective than block practice, but why? Valerie Dennehy wrote on the believeperform website this:

But why is random practice more effective?

One possible reason for the success of random practice stems from the elaboration hypothesis. This hypothesis states that when a learner performs a series of separate skills in a random order, the learner are able to compare and contrast the different skills and as such recognise the similarities and differences between the skills. By understanding and feeling how each movement is distinctive, the learner is able to store the movement more effectively within their long term memory.

I wonder how many youth football coaches are aware of this study and its implications?

But the really interesting part of the research is about the style of learning between random practice and blocked practice. Firstly, that random practice produced much less skilled performance than blocked learning, but paradoxically random practice resulted in more learning.

How? From humankinetics.com :

Shea and Zimny (1983) argued that changing the task on every random-practice trial made the tasks more distinct from each other and more meaningful, resulting in more elaborate memory representations. As revealed in subject interviews after the experiment, random-practice subjects tended to relate the task structure to already learned materials (creating “meaningfulness”), such as discovering that task B had essentially the shape of an upside-down “Z.” Also, they would make distinctions between tasks, such as “Task A is essentially like task C, except that the first part is reversed” (creating “distinctiveness”). The blocked-practice subjects, on the other hand, tended not to make such statements. Instead they talked of running off the performances more or less automatically, without thinking much about it, and blocked practice did not induce the kind of comparative and contrastive efforts in practice that were experienced during random practice. According to this elaboration hypothesis, increased meaningfulness and distinctiveness produce more durable memories for the tasks, and thus increased performance capabilities in tests of retention and transfer.

The long and short of that is that random practice conditions produced more creative learners, who were more imaginative in how they approached a task. The block practice conditions produced machine like learners, who handled tasks efficiently but without much thought.

This is the crucial finding. And it fits perfectly with what I was saying in my past post and tweets on the subject. As I said in my Colourless Cohesion article, academies are producing uninteresting, uncreative players who have identical skillsets, who perform their job with little artisan craft at all, that football was so used to in the past. All this is perfect for a professional coach, especially the more tyrannical system obsessives (like Van Gaal, Guardiola), that want players to fit into their system as neatly as possible.

Players of the past were naturally part of the random practice group because they learned the game in the street, with friends, or in the park. They weren’t taught how to play from 4 years old, they figured it out themselves through trial and error, from hours and hours spent most nights out with a football.

We’re in the age of personalised everything, smartphones, laptops, games consoles, all encourage us to portion more time indoors. This isn’t going to change anytime soon. Kids aren’t going to start playing football in the street or park as much as they did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. It’s never going to happen. Youth coaches though need to be aware of the huge change and adapt their coaching towards a more naturally randomised style or learning, this involves essentially taking a huge step back from the training session in the early years of learning the game, and constructing sessions that focus on randomised conditions, and not block drilling for older training groups.