The Importance of Practice in Education
You can’t deny the importance of practice in education – the importance of applying or reinforcing what we learn. We learn so much in elementary school, high school, college, in sports, extracurricular activities, and lots more places.
For example, this quote sums it up nicely:
“Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”
– Anton Chekhov –
Imagine that you want to be a teacher. You look up everything you can about it, you choose a university, you study and graduate. Once you graduate, you have all the knowledge, but you lack a lot of practice (beyond student teaching and observations).
Gaining knowledge is only half the battle. Then, the other half comes with practice and feedback. This is why practice in education is so important, as this also happens with students as they learn and grow.
How does practice help students? Why is practicing so important? Let’s delve a little deeper into this topic.
Practice in education helps improve skills
Practice helps improve skills and makes you better at what you do. Then, if you practice a skill regularly, you’ll get good at it. This also happens with schoolwork.
We’ve all experienced having to study for many hours, practicing something over and over again before a test or quiz. What happened on the tests where you didn’t practice or study beforehand? Most likely, you didn’t do as well as the students that did practice.
For example, it’s not possible to go to tennis classes for a month and learn all the skills by just watching. You need to practice those skills to learn. It’s the same with everything else: math, reading, sports, speeches, etc.
Practicing boosts self-confidence
Being able to effectively develop a skill you’ve been practicing over time will help you feel confident in yourself. This is so important in the daily life of students.
In fact, the reason is very simple. When we practice something and see results, it makes us happy and makes us want to do it again. This doesn’t mean that practice always brings positive results, but it always brings good things.
Practice in education also helps students to:
- Retain knowledge for longer.
- Apply knowledge automatically without having to think about it.
- Use the skill set to solve other problems.
All of this is important for students to grow, learn and succeed in whatever task they undertake. Following this is a common question: Do students want to practice? Generally, no.
Schools and teachers need to encourage practice
Normally, schools and teachers focus more on improving classroom learning in theory; very few are working to ensure that students get used to working hard and practicing.
Generally, practice requires extra effort that students might not like doing. Therefore, it’s the responsibility of teachers and professors to encourage students to practice more and make them understand how practice improves their learning.
- To do this, teachers can create unique assignments for each skill for the entire class, or for individual students.
- Students can practice these skills before starting a task. That is, learning all about a subject before starting the project. In fact, this boosts their confidence.
When we do something practical, we support learning with different types of memory: auditory, visual, olfactory, contextual, tactile, etc. It’s about working values that are related to effort and involvement, setting goals and learning how to get results.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Roger C. Schank. (1995). What We Learn When We Learn by Doing. Institute for the Learning Sciences Northwestern University. Technical Report No. 60.
- Elizondo, A., Rodríguez, J. V., & Rodríguez, I. (2018). La importancia de la emoción en el aprendizaje: Propuestas para mejorar la motivación de los estudiantes. Cuaderno de pedagogía universitaria, 15(29), 3-11.