Skill Learning

Attention & Automaticity
Students will only pay attention to what you're teaching if they care about it.
If they don't care, they don't pay attention. If they don't pay attention, they don't store it in their short-term memory. If they don't store it in their short-term memory, it can't go to long-term memory.

Controlled Processes
-We pay more attention to things that are new.
Automatic Processes
-When we already know something, we pay less attention to what we're doing.

Three Stages of Skill Acquisition
Cognitive - declarative encoding of the skill - memorization
Associative - categorizing, eliminating misunderstandings - learning
Autonomous - procedure becomes more automated, applied appropriately

Power Law of Learning
Performance of skills, even complex skills, improves according to the following power law:
Time=a(Practice)-b

Transfer of Skills
Positive Transfer - apply what has been learned in another situation - problem is that transfer can be narrow
Negative Transfer - you're learning something new, but you get it confused with something they already know - problem is that errors can be strong (you're sure you're right, but you're not)

Interaction and Individuation
Quality of interaction - what information can your technology get from your students' answers?
Frequency of interaction - more is better
Individuation - let students decide how to proceed - allow for individual needs