Overlearning

When you're learning a new idea, for example a new vocabulary word or a new concept or a new problem solving approach, you sometimes tend to practice it over and over again during the same study session. A little of this is useful and necessary, but continuing to study or practice after you've mastered what you can in the session is called overlearning. Overleaning can have its place. It can produce an automaticity that can be important when you're executing a serve in tennis or a perfect piano concerto. If you choke on tests or public speaking, overlearning can be especially valuable.

but be wary of repetitive overlearning during a single session. Research has shown it can be a waste of valuable learning time.

The reality is, once you've got the basic idea down during a session, continuing to hammer away at it during the same session doesn't strengthen the kinds of long term memory connections you want to have strengthened. Worse yet, focusing on one technique is a little like learning carpentry by only practicing with a hammer.

Using a subsequent study session to repeat what you're trying to learn is just fine and often valuable. It can strengthen and deepen your chunked neuron patterns. But be wary; repeating something you already know perfectly well, is, face it, easy

Deliberate Practice

Instead, you want to balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult. This focusing on the more difficult material is called deliberate practice. It's often what makes the difference between a good student and a great student.

Interleaving

Once you have the basic idea of the technique down during your study session, sort of like learning to ride a bike with training wheels, start interleaving your practice with problems of different types or different types of approaches, concepts, procedures.

Mastering a new subject means learning not only the basic chunks, but also learning how to select and use different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies. This is called interleaving.

In science and math in particular it can help to look ahead at the more varied problem sets that are sometimes found at the end of chapters. Or you can deliberately try to make yourself occasionally pick out why some problems call for one technique as opposed to another. You want your brain to become used to the idea that just knowing how to use a particular concept, approach, or problem-solving technique isn't enough. You also need to know when to use it. Interleaving your studies, making it a point to review for a test, for example, by skipping around through problems in the different chapters and materials can sometimes seem to make your learning a little more difficult, but in reality, it helps you learn more deeply.

Although practice and repetition is important in helping build solid neural patterns to draw on, it's interleaving that starts building flexibility and creativity. It's where you leave the world of practice and repetition, and begin thinking more independently.

Developing expertise in several fields means you can bring very new ideas from one field to the other, but it can also mean that your expertise in one field or the other isn't quite as deep as that of the person who specializes in only one discipline.