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. Join my online learning community: https://www.benjaminkeep.com/community 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 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...