Avoiding Task Misalignment for Successful Practice

Task alignment and posture

When you perform some action, your body and/or you mind are performing a task. You are deploying all the resources to accomplish that task. Your entire being orients itself towards the accomplishment. If you can actually perform the task with any level of fluency, all of this happens automatically. When you speak, your mouth opens and makes the right shapes, when you walk, your body changes posture, when you read, your eyes focus and your brain is attuned to perceiving ink blots on a page as meaningful.

Running pose example

In some ways, you only know what the task is from the posture you adopt. A good example is demonstrating running. When you are asked to adopt a static pose of a runner, you will most likely stand on one foot, lean forward, step out with the other foot and put your arm forward. Most people (as online photos show) put the same arm forward as their forward foot. This is also how the author of a poster for a pre-war Olympics drew a runner.

However, the problem with this is that it is the exact opposite of what people do when running. When you run the arm that is in front of the body, is the one that is the opposite of the forward foot. We have all run, a professional artist is skilled at depicting what they see. Yet, we so easily get it wrong. Why is that?

That is because the task of running and the task of adopting a static pose of a runner are fundamentally different. They have different goals, they require a different perspective, they employ different muscles, and so on. We therefore naturally adopt a different posture to complete these two different tasks - even though when we talk about them, we think of the pose as just a snapshot of the actual run. But our mental and physical orientation is directed towards the actual task, not our expectation of what it will be.

When what we are saying we are doing and what our mind and body are actually trying to is different is a ‘task misalignment’. And how do we know that we have a task misalignment? It may take a while but a good clue is that our posture during practice is different from the posture during performance of the activity itself.

Task: Key concept for understanding performance

The idea of a task is fundamental to help us practice the right thing. Task is what you are actually doing, not what you are saying you’re doing. This is not just relevant to physical poses. Famously, we may say we are learning a subject when we are really primarily learning to pass an exam in the subject. This is important because we orient all of our efforts towards that task. So a person who is learning about something because they want to solve a problem will approach the task very differently from someone who wants to pass an exam.

This is true even in the more extensive physical activities like distance running. We may think that the aim of a professional runner is to be able to run fast but it fact it is to win races, set records or beat opponents. This means that the practice is not only focusing on speed but on speed that peaks at particular time and can be deployed in a particular contexts. So an athlete will structure their training very carefully to be ready on race day - not just to run fast at some point.

The problem is that our vision of what the task is, is compromised by our way of talking about it. We will say that we want to learn to play the piano but not say, we want to learn to play it so that we can play a three songs we like for pleasure. These are different tasks.

Posture: How a task is revealed

The next key concept is that of posture. Task is what our body and mind orients itself to do. It is the posture we take to solve the task. Posture here is a metaphor - it may not be an actual physical pose. But that may be a component of it.

That’s also why experts are often bad teachers of their subject - they are performing a different task. Native speakers are not always automatically good teachers of their language or translators. Teaching and translation are different tasks and when we get ready to perform them, we adopt different postures than when we are simply trying to say something.

This has both positive and negative consequences. Negative in that we often spend a lot of time practicing to adopt the wrong posture for the actual task. Positive in that the actual task does not depend so much on the sequence as described in a textbook (writing a textbook is a different task which makes the writer adopt a different posture).

So we can run before we can walk, we can learn sign language before spoken language, we can learn more difficult math before easier math, we can learn useful medical diagnostics before learning about complex chemistry. We can learn to play jazz before the classical piano or even before any basic pop-songs. All of those things are different tasks.

10 Task misalignment examples

Task misalignment is incredibly common but it can also reveal much about both the mental schemas and targets for actual practice. That’s why it is important to spend a certain amount of time closely examining examples of task misalignment at different levels.

Some common examples of when the practice of the task is misaligned with the performance.

1. Memorising vs learning / recognition vs recall
2. Reading instead of understanding
3. Practice for performance
4. Giving examples vs doing things (what is the Czech for ‘have’ as in ‘I have done’)
5. Defining things for understanding
6. Understanding for making inferences
7. Achieving good grades for developing education
8. Being able to do something vs understanding
9. Being able to do something vs teaching (expertise vs metaexpertise)
10. Playing note sequences vs playing parts of songs

1 Mistaking memorisation for learning

One of the most common problems we all experience when we are learning is remembering key concepts or patterns. In response, we make a lot of effort to memorise pairs such as word and meaning or picture and label. We often make flashcards and quiz ourselves - and now, with computers and smartphones, we even turn things into games.

In as much as having things in our head is important, this is not a bad way of building up an inventory. It is great for languages, mathematical concepts, medical conditions, geography, and many more subject. But the confusion comes at thinking that being able to recall something from a prompt as in a flashcard is the same as using it in a real context.

While we are memorising items, we are developing a skill of reacting to prompts in flashcards. That is the performance we are getting better at. And gamifying this is good for motivating us but it also leads us to optimise our performance to succeed at the game rather than develop the skill we are hoping for. Because using flashcards is in itself a task and our mind/body orient itself to solve it first and foremost. So it is possible to be very good at the ‘flashcard’ game and relatively bad at the actual task that we are memorising for.

That’s not to underestimate the importance of memorising things - but we must think of it only as a supporting or scaffold task - not the ultimate target. In fact, rote learning has gained a very bad reputation precisely because of this. But when used in support of the task, it can be very useful.

2 Confusing recall and recognition

There is a common mistake people make that is a subtype of the above error. It is confusing recognition for recall. Students often make this mistake during revision. They read something in a textbook or their notes and feel like they now remember it. But being able to recognise something is not the same as recognising it (as we have all found out during exams at some point). That’s why two-sided flashcards are so useful even if they themselves suffer from a different kind of this problem.

3 Reading instead of understanding

Many students spend a lot of time reading assigned texts. But ‘reading’ is just the name of the task. It is not simply to decode the letters into sound and create mental pictures. The actual task is understanding, comparing, making connections and conclusions. Those all require different approaches and have to be practiced separately. And many of them happen before and after reading.

4 Mistaking practice for performance

This is a very easy mistake we make. We are practicing something that looks like the thing we are practicing for. But it is missing a crucial element - the moment of live engagement. Whether it is actually performing in front of a live audience or simply in a context where the outcomes matter, the moment provides an important element which orients us differently. It could be simply an increased level of internal pressure or a new context. Which is why (as we’ll see below) we always have to work hard to link practice to performance and we also have to practice the elements of unpredictability in performance.

5 Substituting performance for practice

The opposite confusion is also common. We are performing something every day and we are assuming that we’re also practicing. But practice is a very different task and requires different orientation and focus. We can improve through repetition of performance in this way but only with reflection and certain levels of performance will only be possible if we separate practice from regular performance.

6 Substituting giving examples for using them

When somebody asks you to give an example of something you are familiar with, you often struggle. That is not because you lack knowledge or skill but because giving an example of something is a different task that requires a different orientation.

But there is is an even bigger problem. Because when we are giving an example, our entire schematic orientation changes, the examples tend to be incomplete. They follow the schema of example giving and that leads to big misconception.

Both giving examples and giving examples that actually represent what you are giving the example of is a task that requires a different kind of mental orientation and focus - which means something that can be practiced.

7 Substituting defining for understanding

A special kind of task misalignment is confusing being able to define something for understanding it. This is a companion to the problem with giving examples. Giving definitions is a very different task and skill from understanding and figuring things out.

The opposite is also true. Reading a definition is different from learning to be able to understand the definition. Something textbook authors should take to heart.

8 Substituting understanding for making inferences

There’s a difference between understanding something and being able to make useful inferences about it. They are different tasks. I may be trying to understand something in order to be able to restate its definition in my own words. For example, I may try to understand the difference between voltage and wattage in electricity and be able to explain it on an exam. But it does not follow, that I can make useful inferences about the design of an electrical system. On the other hand, I may be able to do that without a full understanding of the difference.

This is why so often curricula are misaligned with their stated goal - for example, the goal is to have a population that can deal better with their finances or make good decisions about nuanced policy issues but the curricula are designed to create a population that understands differential calculus or probability theory.

9 Substituting good grades for education

Teaching or studying to the test are well-known phenomena. But understanding the task misalignment helps us better think about how they work.

Just like with gamification, the grades provide the student and her teacher a goal towards which they should both orient all their efforts. Education may be the goal, but all effort goes towards the test. It is telling that people take practice tests - not practice the skill that the test is supposed to measure. For some tests, there are entire industries that promise to prepare you for it (from books to in-person tutorials). Their advertising never mentions that you will actually be good at the thing the test measures. And indeed, you may not have to be.

10 Being able to do something for understanding

This is the converse of the understanding - inferences misalignment. We assume that just being able to do something means we can explain it. But those are very different tasks. We are all native speakers of at least one language, but very few of us can name let alone describe most of the rules that govern how we speak.

11 Understanding for being able to explain

Einstein supposedly said, that if you cannot explain something simply, you don’t understand it. But that is not true. Understanding and explaining are two different tasks and it is entirely possible, in fact, it is very common that we can do one and not the other.

That is not to say that the act of explaining something does not improve our understanding. It most definitely does. But the problem is that it often improves our own understanding more than that of others. That’s why introductory texts are often not very useful to learn much about the discipline because they distil somebody’s own understanding.

Meta expertise (expertise about a subject or skill) is a separate skill because describing things is a different task from trying to understand them. They share many similarities but they are different.

12 Being able to play a series of notes vs playing songs

When people practice sight reading (playing directly from sheet music), they often spend a lot of time practicing which note they should play based on what they see in the notation. But that is a very different task from playing the song. The task of playing a song from sheet music is not to quickly react with a finger to each individual note - it is to translate patterns into a flow of music. Therefore both require different kinds of practice. They may both contribute to the general skill of being able to play music but they are not the same.

Why is task misalignment so dangerous

Other than not practicing at all, practicing the wrong thing is the most common cause for failing to improve. And we may not always know that we are practicing the wrong thing until we try a different approach.

Not being able to exactly pin-point the task should not stop us from starting to practice, but a significant part of our reflection should be about how what we are practicing actually relates to the task.

Task misalignment can have two consequences for practice:

1. Misdirection (waste of time)
2. Redirection (building scaffolding)

Misdirecting task misalignment

When we completely misalign the task such as with the example of adopting a running pose, we get very little benefit for practice until we notice that misalignment. We are simply practicing the wrong thing. It is not likely that standing on one foot with the wrong arm forward is going to improve any aspect of our running. We might get some side benefits from the strength and stability training but there are most likely more useful ways of doing that.

But there are situations when practicing the ‘wrong thing’ can be useful. That’s the case of redirection of scaffolding.

Redirection (scaffolding)

As we get into higher levels of performance, it is impossible to simply gain enough input by performing the task exactly. Or we need to develop some additional skill to help us practice in the first place.

Memorising vocabulary is an example of a misaligned task that actually helps us build the scaffolding for reading comprehension or translation in the language.

A musician learning to count rhythm or to use a metronome is an example of a scaffolding that will enable that musician to actually practice rhythmic playing later on even if the thing she is practicing is not performance.

Practicing grammatical constructions of academic language will enable us to practice composing paragraphs later on even though academic writing is not simply putting together these constructions, and so on.