What Are the Different Types of Concentration Exercises?

Intensive practice refers to arranging practice periods close together, with no breaks or only short breaks. ^[1] That is to say, a certain skill is continuously practiced for a certain amount of study time, until there is almost no interval between them. ^[2]

Practice is the learner holding improvement

Studies have found that for continuous motor skills, the effect of scattered exercises is better than concentrated exercises. For example, LeBourne & EJArcher (1956) asked five groups of students to learn the turntable tracking task, and all the participants took 30 seconds to practice each time. One group continued to practice 21 times (0-second rest group). For the other four groups, the rest time was inserted during the exercise, which were 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, and 60 seconds. It was found that the longer the rest, the better the performance (Schmidt & Lee, 1999). After the last exercise, all participants were allowed to take a break for 5 minutes, and then they were asked to complete a common migration task. This task was a concentrated exercise task, and the participants did not rest during the 30-second practice period. It was found that after the break, the differences between the groups still existed, which indicates that the distribution of exercises has a relatively lasting effect. ^[1]

For discrete motor skills, studies have shown that concentrated exercises have better learning effects than scattered exercises. For example, Lee and Genovese (TDLee & EDGenovese, 1989) studied the use of discrete motor skills and continuous motor skills to learn motor skills in the same task. The task they used required participants to move a stylus between two metal plates as much as 500 milliseconds. The discrete skills practiced are a single exercise between the two boards, and the continuous skills practiced consist of 20 consecutive exercises between the two boards. For concentrated exercises, there is a 500 millisecond interval between exercises, and for scattered exercises, this interval is 25 seconds. Experimental results have found that concentrated practice is beneficial for learning discrete motor skills but harmful to continuous motor skills (Proctor & Dutta, 1999).