Abstract
The significance of practice and drill in meaningful learning and retention has, in my opinion, been unwarrantedly ignored or downgraded (Gagné, 1962). In many educational circles drill is viewed pejoratively as the hallmark of rote learning. Practice is obviously less important, relatively speaking, in meaningful than in rote learning, because in the latter variety of learning, what is learned cannot be related nonarbitrarily to any ideas in the learner’s cognitive structure, and, thus, can only be retained beyond short periods of time by dint of much effortful repetition. Nevertheless, repetition is still a very significant variable that must be reckoned with if we are concerned with long-term meaningful learning and retention, and with transfer to related, sequentially dependent aspects of subject matter.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Ausubel, D.P. (2000). Practice and Motivational Factors in Meaningful Learning and Retention. In: The Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge: A Cognitive View. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9454-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9454-7_7
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