Too little, too much: A limited range of practice 'doses' is best for retaining grapho-motor skill in children
Introduction
Learning to generate grapho-motor patterns skillfully is a fine motor proficiency that is crucial to the mastery of handwriting. The ability to write proficiently has been shown to advance the development not only of reading, but also of skills such as sentence composition in schoolchildren (Graham & Weintraub, 1996; Ratzon, Efraim, & Bart, 2007; Suggate, Pufke, & Stoeger, 2018). Laboratory studies of tasks requiring handwriting, including of ‘invented’ letters, have been used to study motor skill learning in children (kindergarten, early school years) and adults (Adi-Japha, Berke, Shaya, & Julius, 2019; Adi-Japha & Freeman, 2001, 2000; Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015; Sosnik, Flash, Sterkin, Hauptmann, & Karni, 2014; Sosnik, Hauptmann, Karni, & Flash, 2004; Vinter & Detable, 2008; Vinter & Perruchet, 2000). Practice increases the effectiveness of movement routines for task performance, and leads to the generation of new movement routines (Adi-Japha, Karni, Parnes, Loewenschuss, & Vakil, 2008; Krakauer & Shadmehr, 2006; Schmidt & Lee, 2006). Practice schedules critically affect motor skill learning, affecting within-session gains, i.e., gains in performance attained during the lesson ‘online’, but also the ability to retain the benefits of the lesson in the long run (retention) and the attainment of additional (‘offline’) gains in performance (for review, see Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015).
Following an effective practice schedule, gains in motor performance may be retrieved in terms of both speed and accuracy (i.e., no tradeoff) and with little conscious effort (Karni & Korman, 2011; Ungerleider, Doyon, & Karni, 2002) – the hallmarks of procedural (‘how to”) memory (Shmuelof, Yang, Caffo, Mazzoni, & Krakauer, 2014). The effectiveness of different practice schedules for motor skill learning have been the subject of extensive studies in adults (Kantak & Winstein, 2012; Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015), but only a small number of studies compared different practice schedules in children, and even fewer addressed grapho-motor skill learning (Coker, Jennings, Farley-Ripple, & MacArthur, 2018).
Fine motor skills can be conceptualized as the generation of small muscle movements by one or both hands for coordinated sequences of movements that are relevant for achieving complex actions (Luo, Jose, Huntsinger, & Pigot, 2007); they are a prerequisite for performing everyday tasks such as eating, dressing, and manipulating objects and tools. Grapho-motor skills comprise a subset of fine motor skills applicable to the manual operation of a pencil, pen, or brush, typically during writing or drawing activities that serve as the basis for early learning (Ratzon et al., 2007).
The manner of, and constraints upon, acquisition of new grapho-motor sequences and writing skills by children are the focus of a number of studies (Adi-Japha et al., 2019, 2011; Graham et al., 2008; Graham & Weintraub, 1996; Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015, 2016; Vinter & Chartrel, 2010; Weintraub, Yinon, & Parush, 2009; Wicki, Lichtsteiner, Geiger, & Muller, 2014). Some studies addressed the effectiveness of different practice methods on graphene learning (e.g., multisensory training, visual-motor training, copying, etc. Bara & Gentaz, 2011; Bransford, Franks, Morris, & Stein, 1979; Enfiejian, Sanders, & Lindner, 1975; Ste-Marie, Clark, Findlay, & Latimer, 2004; Stein, 1978; Vinter & Chartrel, 2010, for a review see Santangelo & Graham, 2016). However, the effect of practice schedules on graphene learning has not yet been tested in controlled laboratory conditions.
The acquisition and mastery of procedural (“how to”) skill memory (Squire, 2004) is characterized by at least two broad phases: a within-session (“online”) phase of performance improvement, and a post-session phase reflecting between-session (“offline”) skill stabilization that can also result in the generation of additional, delayed gains. The latter phase is a latent, time-dependent phase occurring after the termination of practice, referred to as a consolidation phase (Dudai, Karni, & Born, 2015; see reviews:; Robertson, 2009; Walker, 2005). Consolidation processes can lead to robust retention, but also to the expression of additional improvements in some aspects of task performance and qualitative changes indicative of the evolution of new task routines and new brain states offline (e.g., Gabitov et al., 2014, Gabitov et al., 2015; Appleman, Albouy, Doyon, Cronin-Golomb, & King, 2016; Friedman & Korman, 2016; Sosnik et al., 2014). The resulting gains are maintained for weeks (following a single session) and months (following multi-session training), periods in which additional, smaller gains may occur (Adi-Japha, Strulovich-Schwartz, & Julius, 2011; Dorfberger, Adi-Japha, & Karni, 2007; Korman, Raz, Flash, & Karni, 2003).
There is evidence showing that learning can occur in the absence of any long-term performance gains, and, conversely, that substantial offline gains in performance can occur without measurable gains within learning sessions (Huyck & Wright, 2011; Korman et al., 2018; for review, see; Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). Thus, there can be a complex interplay between learning (within-session) and mnemonic processes in different phases of acquiring new skills (Karni, 1996). It is not clear, however, which age-appropriate practice conditions that promote learning (within-session online performance gains) correspond to the conditions necessary or optimal for the triggering and engagement of consolidation processes, and the retention of performance following delay periods. For example, motor skill learning studies suggest that low-performing children may benefit more during the training session than in the consolidation phase (Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015) while children with intermediate levels of performance may benefit more in the consolidation phase (Stickgold, 2009; Wilhelm, Metzkow-Mészàros, Knapp, & Born, 2012). The current study tested the effect of the amount of practice (Experiment 1) and the distribution of practice sessions (Experiment 2) on grapho-motor learning in 2nd grade children.
Studies comparing practice protocols that include large amounts vs. small amounts of practice within a single session (SS) (Aberg, Tartaglia, & Herzog, 2009; Hauptmann & Karni, 2002; Hussain, Sekuler, & Bennett, 2009; Savion-Lemieux, Bailey, & Penhune, 2009; Savion-Lemieux & Penhune, 2005; Wilhelm, Metzkow-Mészàros, Knapp, & Born, 2012; Wright & Sabin, 2007) generally show that increasing the amount of practice results in better retention (Hauptmann, Reinhart, Brandt, & Karni, 2005; Park & Shea, 2003, 2005; Shea & Kohl, 1991). For example, in primary school children practicing a grapho-motor task, the number of correct task iterations afforded in the training session may constitute a factor in the evolution of consolidation phase gains (Julius & Adi-Japha, 2016, Cohen's d = 1.47). Thus, perceptual, as well as motor, implicit learning paradigms suggest that memory consolidation processes may be triggered only after a critical number of task repetitions; also, the nature of the knowledge retained in long-term memory may change as a function of the amount of training afforded (Aberg et al., 2009; Hauptmann & Karni, 2002; Karni & Sagi, 1993; Korman et al., 2003). Identifying the critical amount of practice that children, for instance, require for optimal learning of letter writing would enable more effective educational practices.
In the current study, we trained children on a grapho-motor task, the “invented letter task” (ILT), using different amounts of training in order to compare these training protocols in terms of learning, within-session gains, and the ability to retain the skill. In the ILT, participants connect three dots in a given sequence to form a ‘letter’ pattern; practice in connecting a dot pattern is standard in learning letter-writing in languages using the Latin alphabet (e.g., “Dizzy from A to Z", Tsur, 2006), Arabic (e.g., “Arabic is our Language”, Israeli Center for Educational Technology, 2010), and Hebrew (e.g., “Magic and Friends”, Israeli Center for Educational Technology, 2019a, Center for Educational Technology, 2019b). Performance on the ILT has been shown to correlate with handwriting speed and accuracy in kindergarteners and second graders, as well as with reading speed in 2nd graders, and to predict handwriting and reading proficiency in the year following the ILT practice (controlling for age, rs = 0.30 - 0.50; Julius, Meir, Shechter-Nissim, & Adi-Japha, 2016).
The ILT was designed to study grapho-motor skill learning in young children and its practice was found to lead, in both children and adults, to robust within-session learning, consolidation phase gains, and good long-term retention of the learned skill (Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015). The phases in mastering the task were found to correspond to phases of skill acquisition described in well-studied motor skill learning paradigms (e.g., Dayan & Cohen, 2011; Dorfberger et al., 2007). The ILT was shown to capture salient features of skill learning, such as an adult advantage in long-term retention (Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015), an earlier expression of gains in children than in adults following a training session (Adi-Japha et al., 2019), as well as an atypical course of skill acquisition by children with language impairment (Adi-Japha et al., 2011). These features were also reported by other studies using different procedural memory tasks (Ashtamker & Karni, 2013; Desmottes, Maillart, & Meulemans, 2017a; Dorfberger et al., 2007; Hedenius et al., 2011).
In the first experiment of the current study, we aimed to study the effects of the amount of training afforded within a single practice session. To this end, the effects of 12-blocks of ILT training, which was found effective in previous studies (e.g., Adi-Japha et al., 2011, 2019; Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015, 2016), were compared in terms of learning and long-term retention to 24-blocks training and 6-blocks training (Wilhelm et al., 2012), all afforded in a single, spaced practice session.
One factor that determines the effectiveness of a given practice protocol is the number of task iterations afforded during the practice session; another factor is the how practice is parsed across time, both within the practice session (e.g., whether breaks are afforded) and across multiple sessions (e.g., how long or intensive the training is afforded at each meeting). The term ‘distribution of practice’ refers to the relationship between the time effectively spent on performing a task (i.e., all trials of the task) and the time spent resting between bouts of learning-training. It is used to refer to both the rest periods afforded within a single practice session and the much longer rest intervals (e.g., days) between several practice sessions (Dail & Christina, 2004; Lee & Genovese, 1988; Schmidt, 1991). In the context of Experiment 2, we refer specifically to the “distribution of practice” over several consecutive days (daily sessions); this protocol is referred to by some authors as distributed practice.
In some studies, the distribution of practice over several days, enabling sleep between practice sessions, was the most important factor affecting both learning and retention in young adults (Gerbier, Toppino, & Koenig, 2015; Kwon, Kwon, & Lee, 2015; Savion-Lemieux & Penhune, 2005; Shebilske, Goettl, Corrington, & Day, 1999). Although a role of sleep in memory consolidation has been traditionally associated with word list learning and, later, with the declarative memory systems (see Walker, 2005), recent studies have extended these notions into the procedural, and, more specifically, motor memory domain in adults (e.g., Fischer, Hallschmid, Elsner, & Born, 2002; Karni, Tanne, Rubenstein, Askenasy, & Sagi, 1994; Maquet, 2000; Walker, Brakefield, Hobson, & Stickgold, 2003). In children, however, sleep may not be a necessary condition for motor skill consolidation (Adi-Japha et al., 2019; Adi-Japha & Karni, 2016; Ashtamker & Karni, 2013; Wilhelm, Diekelmann, & Born, 2008; Wilhelm et al., 2012), although sleep can afford additional performance gains expressed 24 h following the initial training session (Ashtamker & Karni, 2013).
In general, “massing practice” or lumping significant amounts of practice within a single session, has been considered beneficial for short-term performance, whereas distributing practice—that is, separating practice or study sessions by time or other activities—has been found more beneficial for long-term learning (Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). For example, Stafford and Dewar (2014) analyzed gameplay data of 854,064 players and found that players who spread their practice over multiple sessions tended to achieve higher scores in later trials of the game (Cohen's d = 1.46).
In the second experiment of the current study, we aimed to study the effects of the distribution of practice by testing whether the possibly less effective 6-blocks ILT practice in Experiment 1 could be made more effective. Specifically, it was tested whether multiple 6-blocks practice sessions over four consecutive days (daily sessions), enabling sleep between practice sessions, would be advantageous for 2nd graders compared to a protocol in which the same amount of practice was afforded in a single session of practice.
The aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of the amount and scheduling of training afforded to the acquisition of a grapho-motor skill and its consolidation into long-term memory of 7–8 year old schoolchildren (2nd graders). In 2nd grade children, writing becomes an increasingly important means of communication and expression.
Although in many education programs writing instruction often starts with practicing single letters, most studies of writing interventions do not consider the amount of practice allocated to this early stage, or the contribution of distribution of practice. For example, a recent meta-analysis (Santangelo & Graham, 2016) addressed multiple factors of handwriting instruction across interventional and experimental studies among children (kindergarten age through 12th grade), but did not address the issue of whether the ‘dose’ of practice afforded in a lesson, or the distribution of practice between lessons, was of importance. The analysis, nevertheless, indicated that a necessary factor in writing skill acquisition is the affording of practice. Specifically, the data underscored the benefits of extensive practice in acquiring proficiency in writing, with 10 or more hours devoted to practice resulting in a significant greater legibility gains compared to 8 h or less. Furthermore, although several authors have suggested an advantage for distributed practice schedules in the acquisition of writing skills by children (e.g., Coker et al., 2018; Santangelo & Graham, 2016), the notion was not directly tested in controlled laboratory conditions in respect to the distinction between learning and retention (the generation of lasting skill). Thus, the current study addressed the constraints on the ability to acquire basics skills of handwriting in this age-group.
The following questions were addressed in Experiments 1 and 2 of the current study:
- i)
How does the amount of practice (6 blocks, 12 blocks, or 24 blocks) afforded in a single session of training determine the acquisition, the expression of delayed (consolidation phase) gains, and the long-term retention, of a grapho-motor task in 7–8 year old schoolchildren?
As a 12-block practice group was shown in a previous study to result in effective skill acquisition (Julius & Adi-Japha, 2015), it was hypothesized that the 6-block practice group would perform less well than the 12-block practice group in all learning phases. It is not predicted whether, and what, differences would emerge between the 12- and the 24-blocks practice groups. No hypothesis was made in this regard.
- ii)
Which practice schedule is more effective in enabling the acquisition, consolidation, and retention of the grapho-motor task: a single session (SS) training (24 blocks) or multi-session (MS) practice of the same total amount of blocks but distributed over four successive days (6 blocks in each session)?
Based on results of motor skill learning tasks in adults, it was hypothesized that the single-session practice group would be superior to the distributed practice group by the end of the session, while the distributed practice group would show superior results in the later phases of learning. It is not predicted whether or not retention of the MS 24-block practice group would show superior results over the SS 12-block practice group. No hypothesis was made in this regard.
Section snippets
Participants
Seventy-six 7–8 years old 2nd graders (Mage = 90 months, SD = 5.2 months, age range = 84–96 months; 28 girls) were recruited for the study. Of these, 18 children participated in the SS 6-blocks practice, 18 children in the SS 12-blocks practice, and 20 children in the SS 24-blocks practice. An additional 20 children practiced with 24 blocks in the multi-session (MS) condition. There was an additional participant in the 6-blocks practice group whose data was omitted, as they were more than 2.5 SD
Results
Mixed model analyses were used to test the effect of the amount of practice (Experiment 1: 6-blocks vs. 12-blocks vs. 24-blocks in a single session), and the effect of practice schedule (Experiment 2: single vs. multi-session training).
Discussion
The attainment of proficiency in grapho-motor skills, such as handwriting, has been the focus of observational studies, and to a lesser extent subject to controlled, laboratory studies (Coker et al., 2018; Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2015; Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2008; Hoy, Egan, & Feder, 2011). Nevertheless, recommendations for effective learning and mastering of grapho-motor skills are derived from observational as well as controlled studies (e.g., Graham et al., 2015). Based on
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Rafat Ghanamah: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Hazar Eghbaria-Ghanamah: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology. Avi Karni: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Esther Adi-Japha:
Declaration of competing interest
We declare that we know of no conflicts of interest associated with this publication, and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (Rafat Ghanamah) upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgement
The study was supported by the Bar-Ilan Dangoor Centre for Personalized Medicine.
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2022, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyCitation Excerpt :The latter processes may result in the generation of different representations of the task solution routine. Notwithstanding, it has been suggested that spaced learning provides opportunities for forgetting between training sessions, a finding supported in the current task (Ghanamah et al., 2020), and is frequently found in the learning of individuals with developmental disabilities (Adi-Japha & Abu-Asba, 2014; Adi-Japha, Fox, & Karni, 2011; Adi-Japha, Strulovich-Schwartz, et al., 2011). Relevant task features are likely to be present during subsequent learning experiences and reactivated in memory, and thus they are forgotten to a lesser degree (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2012).
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2021, Journal of Communication DisordersCitation Excerpt :Logistic regression (right hand side of Table 4) pertaining to the difference between the number of children in the TD and DLD groups who had (i.e., a binary variable = had/did not have) high-level change categories in their drawings was used to account for the non-linear distribution of the number of high-level changes drawn by children. Nevertheless, the same findings were found in the two analyses (Ghanamah, Eghbaria-Ghanamah, Karni, & Adi-Japha, 2020). It should be noted that the linear regression suggests a model for predicting the frequency of use of high-level change categories, where the R2 improved from .206 with just Group as predictor to .320 in Model 3A (.364 in model 3B, Table 4).
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2021, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyCitation Excerpt :There is good evidence showing that repeated practice can result in faster and more accurate performance (Eichenbaum, 2011; Ferman, Olshtain, Schechtman, & Karni, 2009) not only in learning nonlinguistic skills (Anderson et al., 2004; Karni, 1996; Logan, 1988) but also in language acquisition (Krashen, 1994; Robinson, 1996; Segalowitz, 2003; Ullman, 2001). Thus, repetitions and practice enable the development and fluent use of sequential processing routines in perceptual, motor, and linguistic domains (Ghanamah, Eghbaria-Ghanamah, Karni, & Adi-Japha, 2020; Haider, Esser, & Eberhardt, 2020; Hussain, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2003; Page & Norris, 2008, 2009; Savion-Lemieux, Bailey, & Penhune, 2009; Szmalec, Page, & Duyck, 2012), resulting in high levels of sequence fidelity in performance. In language learning, the processing of complex sequential structures is crucial (e.g., Hsu & Bishop, 2014; Vermeylen, Abrahamse, Braem, & Rigoni, 2020), and learning to address verbal sequences via repetitions improves the representation not only of items but also of their order in the sequence; thus, subsequent recall of verbal material most often proceeds with the serial positions of the verbal items well maintained (Kalm & Norris, 2016; Smyth & Scholey, 1996).