Rapid Cycle Deliberate Practice is More than Repetition: The Role of Subtasks in Mastery Learning

Deliberate practice has been hailed as the panacea to achieve mastery learning in medical education, yet it can be very time consuming and fails to consider the innate cognitive differences among learners. In this work, I propose a modification to traditional deliberate practice called “Sub-Task Cycling”. Sub-Task cycling partitions a learning intervention into discrete sub-tasks in order to help facilitate the process of chunking. With regards to orotracheal intubation, Sub-Task Cycling is demonstrated to achieve mastery learning more efficiently than traditional Rapid Cycle Deliberate Practice. This difference is attributed to Sub-Task Cycling optimizing instructional design from an information processing theory perspective and minimizes the intrinsic cognitive load on learner's working memory.