%% ### #todo - [ ] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/10/26/variable-mastery/ - [ ] https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2023/11/2-1 %% Interleaving is an effective strategy for both **[[Declarative knowledge refers to factual information about the world (knowing that)|declarative]], explicit learning** as well as **unconscious, implicit learning**. The **way that information is presented** to learners can have a meaningful impact on learning. In **blocked practice**, learners focus on a single skill or topic for an entire learning session. In **interleaved practice**, learners mix up their practice by adding additional skills and topics. Research suggests that interleaved practice may promote better learning compared to blocked practice – although it depends on the learning task and purpose. Interleaved practice is about the **sequence** (or order) in which learning activities happen. Instead of practicing related skills (e.g., skills A, B, and C) in a series (e.g., following a pattern of "AAABBBCCC"), it's often better to practice them in parallel (e.g., "ABCABCABC", or even randomly) – although that's still a series, of course, but with shorter cycles. Here are some **concrete examples** to highlight the distinction between interleaved practice and blocked practice: - When studying for a maths test that covers both derivation and integration, interleaved practice involves mixing in practice examples from both topics within a single session, whereas blocked practice involves studying the two topics in isolation during separate sessions. - When practicing free kicks in football, interleaved practice involves attempts from various angles and distances, whereas blocked practice involves many consecutive attempts from the same spot. - Another example comes from Brown and colleagues (2014, p. 46) that neatly describes how a study demonstrated the benefits of mixed over blocked practice: >A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets. (From: R. Kerr & B. Booth, Specific and varied practice of motor skill, Perceptual and Motor Skills 46 (1978), 395–401.) - And another passage from Brown (2014, p. 81), building on Hall and colleagues (1994): >It is one skill to hit a curveball when you know a curveball will be thrown; it is a different skill to hit a curveball when you don’t know it’s coming. Baseball players need to build the latter skill, but they often practice the former, which, being a form of massed practice, builds performance gains on short-term memory. ### Benefits **Interleaving helps discriminate between situations and apply correct responses**. When learning declarative information, interleaving helps learners to tell apart or discriminate between similar concepts.^[Rohrer, 2012] Because learners are confronted with different concepts during practice, they learn to make comparisons between concepts.^[Carvalho and Goldstone, 2014b] As a result, they learn to recognize critical features of concepts or skills ("What kind of situation is this?"), which allows them to select and execute the correct response. I imagine that this is a critical for the ability to [[Transfer is the use of skills and knowledge in a new situation, different than where they were originally acquired|transfer]] learning to new areas. - It seems that interleaving teaches [[Conditional knowledge refers to knowledge of the situations in which particular declarative or procedural knowledge is appropriate and applicable (if-then)|conditional knowledge]] – for instance, knowledge of when to apply the Pythagorean theorem when solving a math puzzle. Interleaving may also **strengthen and create new memory associations**.^[Dunlosky et al., 2013] Interleaved practice forces learners to [[Retrieval practice involves drawing ideas from memory rather than looking up the answer|retrieve]] different responses or behaviors from long-term memory, whereas blocked practice allows learners to continually apply the same response or behavior. Interleaving can thus reinforce neural connections between different tasks, environments, and correct responses. Interleaving helps **create schemas** or [[Mental models are a type of cognitive structure that encode and represent an individual's lifetime experiences and learnings|mental models]].^[Oakley et al., 2021] A schema is a set of “neural shelves” that holds together the different sets of links that a person is learning about a subject, including both procedural and declarative components. Schemas are the quintessential form of prior knowledge. They enable learners to assess changing conditions and adjust their responses as needed. They allow people to learn new material about a subject more easily. Interleaving has been studied across a wide range of learning materials and subjects, from motor learning to mathematics.^[Weinstein et al., 2019] Interestingly, it appears that this strategy is effective for both explicit and implicit learning. Relatedly, Oakley and colleagues (2021) claim that interleaving and spaced repetitions were the best methods to learn through the [[The procedural learning pathway takes input from the entire cortex and sends it through the basal ganglia to create links in long-term memory|procedural system]] according to the evidence from research. ### Nuances **Varied (or variable) practice** is a related but distinct idea. It refers to learning a topic or skill in many different ways and contexts. For example, you might play tennis on different courts. In this way, you see more nuances and better understand the interrelationships between different elements. Whether interleaved or blocked practice is best depends on the **learning task** as well as the **learning purpose**: - Rapid and accurate performance of a narrow set of perceptual or motor skills is best learned when practice is **blocked** – when the learner continuously practices the same behavior, rather than mixing the practice of different behaviors. - In conceptually oriented testing, in contrast, it is more beneficial to **interleave** practice by mixing multiple types of tasks. The benefit is thought to result because interleaving provides learners with both the opportunity to practice item discrimination as well as improve strategy selection. It appears that there's a **[[There's a difference between long-term learning and short-term performance|tradeoff between short-term performance and learning]]**: If you want to minimize errors during a session of practice, blocked is better than interleaved. However, if you want to maximize learning and thus performance in the longer-term, interleaved tends to be better than blocked. The following study, replicated in Brown et al. (2014, pp. 49-50), provides evidence for this tradeoff: >During practice, the students who worked the problems in clusters (that is, massed) averaged 89 percent correct, compared to only 60 percent for those who worked the problems in a mixed sequence. But in the final test a week later, the students who had practiced solving problems clustered by type averaged only 20 percent correct, while the students whose practice was interleaved averaged 63 percent. The mixing of problem types, which boosted final test performance by a remarkable 215 percent, actually impeded performance during initial learning. A consequence of the tradeoff discussed above is that **many learners mistakenly believe that blocked practice is more effective** for learning than interleaved practice, because the results are immediately visible. As a result, interleaved practice is an underused strategy for learning. **Interleaving matches reality better than blocked practice**. In everyday life, we encounter a wide range of situations and problems somewhat randomly and unpredictably, rather than in a neat sequence. It's better to mix up one's practice because that's typically how you'll use the acquired skills and knowledge at a later point. [[Learning is enhanced when the learning and application context are similar]]. ### Application This seems fairly straightforward: Instead of practicing skills or studying material in isolation, mix it up by learning several different things within the same session. ### Mechanism A prominent report on learning^[National Academies, 2018] claims that the mechanisms underlying interleaved and blocked practice are ongoing topics of research, and that the mechanisms involved likely depend on the kind of learning task. A broad guess is that interleaving makes practice more **effortful** and requires more engagement from the learner, which leads to **deeper processing**. Via [[Learning Versus Performance – An Integrative Review]]: >The **schema theory of motor control** claims that variable practice promotes long-term retention and transfer by familiarizing learners with the general motor programs that underlie motor skills. %%See also "Motor Schema" in [[Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning]], p. 2350.%% --- Created: [[2022-05-05]] Type: #permanent Topics: [[Learning (Index)]] Related notes: - [[What are the most effective learning strategies?]] - [[Learning benefits from strategically regulated repetition and practice]] - [[Desirable difficulties refer to challenges encountered during practice that lead to stronger and more enduring learning]] Links: - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-interleaving-effect-mixing-it-up-boosts-learning/