A3 — Designing Practice Tasks

This research-informed conceptual synthesis examines the design of practice tasks in movement skill learning. It distinguishes the action problem from the learning problem and considers representativeness, variability, simplification, practice order, role-specific task structure, and challenge regulation.

Practice quality is not reduced to resemblance to competition, difficulty, variability, or success rate. Instead, the analysis asks what problem the learner must solve, what information and action opportunities the task preserves, and whether a task modification changes the difficulty of the same problem or changes the problem itself.

This manuscript is Article 3 of the six-article series Learning and Teaching Movement Skills.