Drill and practice is one of my favorite strategies to use for test or any other skills. I think of sports when I hear drill and practice. Take basketball for example, you practice your free throws everyday for 4 hours using the exact same shooting technique. Eventually you are going to get better because you have practiced so much that it is almost impossible for you to miss. When it comes to education drill and practice has it pros and cons. Teachers use drill and practice techniques for things like multiplication. Students need to know these on command and drill and practice drills the information into your brain. This is good because once you have practiced these enough you will no longer have to practice because you will already know them. The con of drill and practice is that some teachers use drill and practice as a way of teaching and this isn't the correct way to go about teaching and learning. Students then begin to get bored and don't learn anything. A good way to deal with this problem is to only use drill and practice in moderation. And we need to be careful about what content areas we use it in because drill and practice techniques don't have the same effect in a reading class as it does in a math class.
So we just need to make sure that we aren't using it our only method of educating our students.
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I agree with using drill and practice in moderation. In my field base class the first grade students ask to be switched from the computer to another center because they do get bored. You also mentioned about sports, students can play games against each other in groups and individually.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about how we tend to relate drill and practice to sports. I also think about memorization. I remember when I was in school and the teacher use to give me flash cards. I would have to sit by myself for a long time trying to understand words or math.
ReplyDeleteI was read on a website where some teachers still think that drill and practice is a good method of teaching. I would have to disagree but I do believe that it can be incorporated into teaching as a reinforcing technique to a lesson that has been taught already.