Action items vs Coordination items

The purpose of this post is to answer the following question, which was previously left as a comment: "Why should we learn procedures in full, instead of cutting them into their smallest components as we do with declarative knowledge?"

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The short answer is: Fluency. By learning a single, specific method for achieving your desired outcome and training yourself in that method from start to end, you will be able to perform it as easily as breathing when the need arises (At least, you will if you haven't forgotten how to perform it - hence the need for SuperMemo).

On the other hand, if you have learned all the components of a skill, but don't regularly practice them as a combined activity, then you may need to invest considerable thought towards designing an effective method every time you encounter a new situation. Or, you may simply need to train the combined activity as a separate skill. Either way is more time-consuming than simply learning a particular method by heart to begin with.

Principles vs Methods

A method is a specific set of steps that can be performed in order to achieve a desired outcome. For example: "If you want the violin to sound louder, pull the bow faster, and put more weight on the strings"; "If you are about to be kicked in the face, pull your arm up and block". As usual, such rules are most effective when they are non-verbal and automatically applied, rather than thought about beforehand. Unfortunately, thinking as much as Sherlock Holmes does when he fights distracts rather than focuses effort and attention.

In an abstract sense, whereas we normally tend to consider declarative knowledge as a sort of "web" of associations, procedural methods are more like algorithms or enumerations - "if this, do that". Of course, since there are usually many ways to achieve the same outcome, you could easily end up confused by a thought-process sounding something like: "If this, do that... or that ... or that ... or...". Back in one of my first posts (Procedural Knowledge) I said that "a procedural knowledge item is characterised by the purpose the procedure serves... if you know two ways of achieving exactly the same thing then one of those ways is redundant (once again, redundancy is not necessarily bad)"

In contrast, a principle refers to a basic criterion which must be met by any specific method. For example, when playing the violin (or most musical instruments) it is important to keep as relaxed as possible, even in a performance, so that 1) you don't get sore muscles or RSI from playing, and 2) the music does not get affected (eg scratchy, squeaky or otherwise distasteful sounds). In order to relax this way, some people use the Alexander Method, some meditate beforehand, and some just breathe deep. Each of these is a different method, but they all serve the same principle - to relax in order to play better music.

In general, principles are declarative concepts and must be understood sooner or later. But when it is time to build up skill, methods are the way to go. Furthermore, it doesn't matter which method you use, as long as it works.

Action Items
An action item is a "micro-skill" (rather than a skill, per se), which is used to achieve a small, specific effect during application of a more advanced skill. In a way, these are like the "minimum information" elements you would be used to from SuperMemo.

Examples:

• a martial artist can learn a simple kick, and then combine it with many other actions for different purposes or effects
• an artist can learn how to draw simple shapes such as oval, circles and squares, and then use these micro-skills when drawing much more advanced drawings
• a violinist can first learn staccato bowing on the C major scale (for example), before integrating this bowing technique into endless numbers of real pieces

As you can see, these sorts of abilities are quite useless alone, but powerful once enough of them have been mastered in a particular field. However, there is an inherent problem with learning many action items in isolation, and this is what this post is all about. The problem is that while each of these individual actions is a skill, the ability to combine these actions into a fully-formed procedure (i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3 - not just step 1!) is a skill unto itself. That's where coordination items come in.

Coordination items

These items link many action items together to form a specific method for accomplishing a goal. As the name implies, the focus is not on the individual actions, but on integrating the many discrete parts into a smooth, continuous output. I have often found when studying second languages that though a word might be easy to say in isolation, it can still trip me up in a sentence. In such cases, once I master the word, I also try to master the sentence.

Examples:

• Any musical piece, or any piece of artwork, consists of many individual steps taken that make an impression on the onlooker through their overall, combined effect
• A soccer player often makes use of his running, tackling, dribbling (and acting) skills in a game, even while practicing each in isolation during practice sessions
• A computer programmer writes a fully functional piece of software, using many small tricks and methods accumulated over many hundreds of hours

This last one has been of particular interest to me lately. That is, I have been trying to work out how best to formulate the ability to write software programs. While SuperMemo has often been used by others to practice writing computer code correctly (i.e. learning syntax) the ability to frame real world problems as well-defined steps (i.e. algorithms) is a much higher-order ability, and much more interesting and more powerful to learn.

In particular, I have found that a very straightforward way to formulate such knowledge in SuperMemo is to enter simple programming exercises, and thereafter to always answer them in the same way. Although this requires hardly any creativity, we are not trying to retain creative ability (for now!). What we are trying to do is retain the ability to write effective programs. For example, in order to retain the ability to write a simple recursion formula, I have a SuperMemo item which requires me to write a program to find the nth Fibonacci number. I then test the program by finding the 11th number (i.e. n = 11) and check the answer field to see if I am correct. If I ever forget how to do it, I have a screenshot (also in the answer) of the correct code. Once again, although there are many ways to achieve the same effect in a program, in order to learn to be effective you only need to learn one of these methods well. Obviously, if the effect is very important you can learn more than one method, but you should formulate this as a clearly different SuperMemo exercise.

As a summary, when you are training a new skill and retaining it through SuperMemo don't break it down to its smallest parts unless it is useful to do so; that is, if those "micro-skills" are fundamental to your art and are likely to be used and re-used in different scenarios. Even if this is the case, don't limit yourself only to learning action items. Learn how to fluently perform extended applications of your skill, such as playing a whole musical piece, writing a short computer program or speaking a whole page out loud in your second language (not just individual words). This will make you more fluent in practice and make it easier to respond to new situations on the fly using fully internalised responses.