Designing practice activities

When selecting or devising practice activities on basic information for students, teachers should consider these guidelines: 1. Prevent memory overload by introducing new information cumulatively. 2. Build retention with delayed review and discriminated practice. 3. Reduce interference effects by separating confusing elements from one another over time. 4. Emphasize relationships between components of an algorithm and the algorithm itself, between familiar and new information, and between items and their location, if relevant. 5. Reduce processing demands by introducing components before the algorithm or strategy itself and by introducing easier information first. 6. Require quicker responses to foster automaticity. As noted in the introduction to this essay, these six guidelines have not been investigated across all topics or across all populations. Further research is needed. In the meantime, the guidelines serve as an initial response to Pellegrino and Goldman's (1987) question about the form practice should take for students with learning disabilities. The guidelines could be applied to a wide range of content for which automaticity is an ultimate goal--letter-sound correspondences, word reading, numeral identification, math facts, word meanings, geography facts, and so forth.