“They ace the drill, then can’t apply it”

When every question uses the same method, the page is doing a large share of the thinking. Students never have to ask which tool this problem needs, because the heading has already answered. So the drill gives real practice in carrying out the steps and almost none in recognising where the steps belong, and recognising is most of what the exam tests once the topics are mixed and the headings are gone. Nobody is coasting here. The scores are honest; they measure a narrower skill than the exam does.

The routine holds because same-method practice feels like teaching going well. You get quick successes, pages of ticks and a settled class, and most textbooks arrive with the questions already sorted by topic. Practice that mixes things up looks worse in the moment, slower and full of errors, so the tidy kind is easy to keep choosing. The techniques below close the gap in two broad ways: some rebuild the practice itself, mixing question types and continuing past the first success, and some deepen students' sense of what the idea is and where it applies.