Secrets of Interleaved Practice | How Learning Works

Can rearranging the order in which you solve problems accelerate your learning? You bet. This is a breakdown of the idea of interleaving (as opposed to blocked practice), with a couple of tips for using interleaving more effectively.

00:00 Introduction
00:22 Defining blocked practice
01:03 Defining interleaved practice
01:46 The logic behind blocked practice: collecting skills
02:30 Interleaved practice spaces out your practice (which offers one advantage)
03:37 Interleaved practice helps us distinguish things
04:11 Interleaved practice focuses on the right skill
05:02 Time for a test
06:10 Findings from a study on interleaving math homework
07:13 When introducing new topics, start off with blocked practice
07:36 Interleaved practice is not task-switching

Sign up to my email newsletter, Avoiding Folly, here: https://www.benjaminkeep.com/

References

For a more detailed take, I recommend checking out:

Pan, S. C. (2015). The interleaving effect: mixing it up boosts learning. Sci Am, 313(2) (currently available here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/...)

For advice on interleaving in math specifically, see here: http://pdf.retrievalpractice.org/Inte...

The study I mentioned comparing blocked to interleaved math homework problems is below. The numbers I took were from a 30-day delayed test. Delayed tests are where you often see the largest gains for interleaved practice.

Rohrer, D., Dedrick, R. F., & Stershic, S. (2015). Interleaved practice improves mathematics learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(3), 900. (currently available here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED...)

On the idea “blocking first”:

Sorensen, L. J., & Woltz, D. J. (2016). Blocking as a friend of induction in verbal category learning. Memory & cognition, 44(7), 1000-1013.


The photo of Kelvin Herrera was taken from wikipedia and can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_...

The photo of the wren:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...

The photo of the sparrow:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...

Bird cartoon:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...