Drill and Practice

Drill and Practice: The Siren’s Song….

Discussion:  Drill and practice is what most people recognize as education, which is probably why we rely on it so heavily.  Without a doubt, if a person were to engage in repeated drill and practice exercise they would significantly raise their score on a standardized test.  Since that is often the goal of educational systems, teachers rely on drill and practice methods.  The question is whether drill and practice results in lasting learning or any real change in the cognitive development of the student.

Teacher perspective:  The allure is strong.  It is well understood by students, parents, and administrators as a goal orientated method of instruction.  It is easy; generally simple answer or multiple choice response.  Software that can make this type of instruction even easier is likely to be used.

Student perspective:  Easy.  I know what is expected of me.  I go through the exercise, I get the answer and if I do it enough times I know what the questions will be like and I will pass the test.

Reality: Very little learning actually takes place.  A little drill and practice might be ok, just to make the students more comfortable when they get to a standardized test.  Examples for Physics:

Problem Attic: http://www.problem-attic.com/ This is an excellent resource for teachers interested in creating drill and practice exercises.  The site contains an archive of different state and other standardized test question banks.  The questions are arranged by subject and category.  Teachers can choose from multiple choice and short answer questions to build question banks.  The “tests” can be given on paper or online.  The online option can be set to allow students to repeat attempts and will give teachers annotated results and graphs about student and global (whole class) performance.

Minds on Physics:  http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mop A multifaceted resource.  One portion of this site serves as a drill and practice question bank.  Teachers can assign in class or for homework problem sets.  Students work through them and get a score at the end that they can have reported to their teacher.  This also can allow for repeated attempts and will link students to tutorials if they are having difficulty being successful.