I believe what is described is repetition, but not rote learning. That, to me, means memorizing facts without connecting the dots. Rote memorization is learning

I believe what is described is repetition, but not rote learning. That, to me, means memorizing facts without connecting the dots. Rote memorization is learning for an exam by memorizing the previous years' problems, or learning history by memorizing dates and events. If I focus on knowing the previous years problems by heart, I may accidentally make the connections to be able to solve more varied problems, but thats rather inefficient. Similarly, knowing historical dates doesn't imply an understanding of why and how things happened. Learning different conjugations of verbs by using them in sentences isn't rote learning, either. It's rather the opposite, trying to connect the new verb into the existing knowledge of the language. Rote learning alone is useless for most students. Repetition is certainly important in retaining information, no doubt about it, but as with the math examples, you need to apply basic arithmetic in the context of solving equations, for example, to really get a "feel" for it, a sort of automatism where you not only know how to do 1+1, but also WHEN to use this knowledge. As far as complex algorithms and such go, I do believe they can be broken down into pieces, but you really do have to know the pieces and their relations and implications innately, and with complex algorithms, it's really hard to know all the pieces of the puzzle, and sometimes even finding out what is missing is difficult. You can drill something ad infinitum without gaining anything if you're missing something. I believe this to be the secret skill that the article omits. In order to learn effectively, you have to recognize where your knowledge is lacking, find out what it is you should know, and drill those parts. A teacher should help students find these gaps and help fill them. The rest is just a little bit of willpower and discipline.