Problems | Education | Reflective | More Work Is Not Always More Learning

Retrospect | Tuition | RFE | Help

There is a very understandable reaction when a child is weak at something.

Do more.

Weak in Mathematics?

Twenty Questions Can Be One Mistake Twenty Times

A student is struggling with algebra.

So I give twenty algebra questions.

They complete them.

Good.

Except perhaps Question 1 contains the same misconception as Question 20.

The numbers changed.

The worksheet changed.

The pencil moved.

Twenty answers appeared.

But the underlying machinery did not change very much.

In that case, I did not create twenty opportunities for learning.

I may have created twenty repetitions of one unresolved problem.

That distinction matters.

Because from the outside, both situations look industrious.

There is paper everywhere.

Working everywhere.

Corrections everywhere.

A child can be extremely busy while the important thing remains untouched.

Work Has a Very Convincing Appearance

This is one of the difficulties in education.

Learning is partly invisible.

Work is visible.

Parents can see a worksheet.

Teachers can count completed questions.

Tutors can assign chapters.

Students can say:

“I studied for three hours.”

All of those things are real.

But none of them automatically tells us what changed inside the learner.

Three hours may have produced a great deal.

Or very little.

Fifty questions may have automated a useful skill.

Or fifty questions may have allowed a student to become extremely efficient at using a method incorrectly.

So I have become more careful about treating volume as evidence.

Work tells me activity happened.

It does not yet tell me what the activity built.

Sometimes More Is Exactly Right

I want to be careful here.

There is an easy fashionable argument:

“Worksheets are bad. Rote practice is bad. Children need deeper learning.”

I don’t agree with that.

Sometimes the diagnosis really is:

not enough repetitions.

A student understands multiplication but is slow.

Practice.

A student knows an algebraic procedure but still has to think through every tiny step.

Practice.

A student has learnt vocabulary but retrieval is weak.

Retrieve it repeatedly.

A student understands the examination format but cannot yet execute it at examination speed.

Practise under time.

There is nothing intellectually sophisticated about refusing useful repetition.

If repetition is the missing ingredient, then repetition is the repair.

The important question comes before that.

Is repetition actually the missing ingredient?

Because Sometimes the Student Does Not Need Another Question

Suppose a student cannot solve a certain type of problem.

Question 1 fails.

I explain.

Question 2 fails.

I explain again.

Question 3 fails.

Perhaps the natural response is:

“Let’s practise more.”

But by Question 3 I should probably become curious.

What exactly is repeating?

Maybe the student cannot identify which information matters.

Maybe one prerequisite from two years earlier is unstable.

Maybe the mathematical operation is fine but the language of the question is not being decoded.

Maybe the student understands each step when shown but cannot decide which step comes first.

Those are different failures.

Giving ten more questions before locating the failure may simply make the lesson longer.

Not better.

This Happens With “Careless Mistakes” Too

I think “careless” is one of the most overloaded words in education.

A student loses six marks.

Careless.

So:

“Do more papers. You need to be more careful.”

Perhaps.

But look closely.

One error came from copying a number wrongly.

One from not knowing a negative-number rule securely.

One from rushing because time was running out.

One from misreading the question.

One from mental arithmetic overload.

One genuinely appears to be a random slip.

Calling all six carelessness makes six different mechanisms look like one personality defect.

That is not very helpful.

The child hears:

“I am careless.”

But perhaps the useful statement is:

“Your working becomes unreliable when too many steps are held in your head.”

Ah.

Now we can do something.

Write an extra line.

Reduce mental load.

Test again.

That is much smaller than trying to repair a child’s entire personality.

I Think This Is Why Some Children Work Very Hard and Stay in the Same Place

This can be heartbreaking.

A student really is trying.

The parent sees it.

The tutor sees it.

Homework is done.

Practice papers are completed.

Hours are spent.

And the mark barely moves.

Eventually everybody becomes frustrated.

The parent thinks:

“How much more can we possibly do?”

The student thinks:

“Maybe this is simply my limit.”

But effort and direction are different things.

A person can work extremely hard against the wrong bottleneck.

If the bottleneck is conceptual understanding, another timed paper may not repair it.

If the bottleneck is examination timing, another untimed worksheet may not repair it.

If the bottleneck is transfer, twenty nearly identical questions may make the student excellent at recognising twenty nearly identical questions.

Then the examination changes the surface.

Everything disappears again.

More work was done.

But the missing capability was elsewhere.

The Smallest Useful Question May Be: What Keeps Failing?

Instead of immediately asking:

“What else should the student do?”

I think I would first ask:

“What keeps failing?”

Not the subject.

Not:

“Mathematics.”

Smaller.

Where does movement repeatedly break?

Does the student know the idea but forget it?

Know it but fail to recognise when to use it?

Recognise it but execute inaccurately?

Execute accurately but too slowly?

Do everything correctly until the question looks unfamiliar?

This is much closer to something we can work with.

Once the failure is small enough, the work can become small enough too.

And strangely, that can mean doing less while learning more.

Three Students Can Need Three Completely Different Worksheets

This is one reason I keep returning to the reality of three students sitting together.

Imagine all three score poorly on the same chapter.

Student A has not understood the core concept.

Student B understands it but has weak execution.

Student C can execute it perfectly in familiar questions but cannot transfer it.

The chapter heading is identical.

The mark may even be identical.

But giving all three the same fifty questions is a crude response.

Student A needs reconstruction.

Student B needs repetition.

Student C needs variation.

That distinction is useful enough to keep:

Reconstruct. Repeat. Transfer.

Sometimes the student needs the idea rebuilt.

Sometimes the idea exists and needs repetitions until it becomes reliable.

Sometimes it is reliable but trapped inside one familiar form and needs to travel.

Those are three different jobs.

Parents Do Not Need to Diagnose Everything

There is another danger here.

I do not want a parent reading this and thinking:

Wonderful. I now need to become an educational diagnostician.

No.

That is not a better life.

The useful home version can be much smaller.

If a child has been doing a large amount of work without improving, instead of immediately adding more, ask:

“What part keeps going wrong?”

If nobody can answer that clearly, that itself is useful information.

Perhaps the next job is diagnosis.

Not another workbook.

And if the answer is:

“She knows exactly what to do; she just isn’t fast enough yet,”

then good.

Now repetition may be precisely what she needs.

The point is not to avoid work.

The point is to make the work earn its time.

Time Is Part of the Cost

This matters more to me as students get older.

A child does not possess infinite evenings.

School takes time.

Homework takes time.

Travel takes time.

Sleep takes time.

Friends, family, exercise and simply being a child take time too.

So when we add another two hours of work, those hours come from somewhere.

That means educational work should have to justify itself.

Not perfectly.

Learning is messy.

Some practice will be redundant.

Some exercises will turn out to be unnecessary.

We cannot optimise childhood like a factory.

But we can at least ask whether an additional pile of work is aimed at something we have reason to believe needs repairing.

That seems fair to the student.

The Examination Period Makes “More” Especially Dangerous

As examinations approach, anxiety increases.

And anxiety loves quantity.

Three papers completed feels safer than one.

Five chapters revised feels safer than two.

A packed timetable feels like control.

Sometimes the volume is necessary.

There is genuinely a lot to cover.

But there is also a point where adding work reduces the quality of the work already there.

The student becomes tired.

Corrections become superficial.

Mistakes are glanced at rather than understood.

Sleep shortens.

The next day’s learning becomes weaker.

Then we respond to weaker performance by adding more work.

That is a loop worth noticing.

The answer is not automatically “study less.”

It is:

protect the work that is producing improvement.

Everything else deserves examination.

Reality Has to Decide Whether the Work Worked

This is where the RFE test becomes very simple.

We think the student needs ten more questions.

Fine.

Give some.

Then look.

Did the targeted failure reduce?

If yes, continue.

Did accuracy improve?

Did retrieval become faster?

Did the student require fewer prompts?

Did the capability survive a slightly different question?

Good.

The work is earning its place.

But if thirty questions later exactly the same failure appears in exactly the same way, I should not congratulate myself for assigning Question 31.

I should reconsider the model.

Perhaps we are exercising the wrong thing.

That is not an argument against practice.

It is an argument for allowing practice to report back.

Good Tuition Should Sometimes Make the Workload Smaller

This may sound odd coming from a tutor.

Surely tuition adds work.

Often it does.

But I think good diagnosis can also remove work.

If ten apparent problems turn out to come from one missing concept, we can repair one concept.

If repeated careless mistakes turn out to come from overloaded working, we can change the working method.

If a student already has secure knowledge, we do not need to reteach the whole chapter simply because the examination is approaching.

We can work at the frontier.

There is something humane about that.

The student does not need to prove seriousness by being permanently busy.

They need to become more capable.

Those are not always the same thing.

Perhaps “Work Harder” Is an Incomplete Sentence

I still believe in hard work.

Very strongly.

There are things students simply have to practise.

There are difficult periods when there is no elegant shortcut.

There are examinations for which preparation genuinely requires substantial volume.

But perhaps:

Work harder

needs another line underneath it.

At what?

That changes everything.

Work harder at retrieving?

At explaining?

At transferring?

At writing?

At checking?

At timing?

At one missing prerequisite?

Now effort has a destination.

And once the destination is clear, we can see whether the effort is actually getting us there.

I Would Rather See Ten Questions Change Something

Perhaps this is where I end up.

A student brings me a thick completed worksheet.

I am pleased they worked.

That matters.

But I want one more piece of evidence.

What is different now?

Maybe nothing dramatic.

Perhaps a method is slightly faster.

A misconception has disappeared.

A decision is cleaner.

One kind of mistake happens less often.

That is enough.

Something moved.

I would rather see ten questions that change something than fifty questions whose main achievement is becoming fifty completed questions.

And if fifty are what it takes to create that change, then fifty is exactly right.

That is the part I want to keep correctable.

Not less work.

Not more work.

The amount of work required by the actual problem.

Perhaps that is a quieter way to think about tuition.

Before adding another worksheet, another paper, another hour—

find the thing we are asking the work to change.

Then let reality tell us whether it did.