Interleaving: Your Studying Super Power!
By Lars Olson
We’ve all been there. You have a FINAL EXAM at the end of the week that you HAVE to study for (and you haven’t studied much during the semester). A paper is due and you begin the night before. You have to learn the moves to your first figure skating routine in two days (Just me? Ok.) The point is, we have all been confronted with something that required us to learn a lot of new information within a specific amount of time. How did we all prepare for that big moment?
WE CRAMMED.
I know, I know, I’ve been there. We all have demands on our time: work, children, a heavy course load. It’s fine though, you found time on Monday and you worked on it allllll day. On Tuesday you reviewed the same things and you recalled them with ease. Good job! The big test comes on Friday. You feel good. Remember Tuesday? You crushed that review! You get in the room for the test and you can’t remember anything! Or you can’t remember which formula to use, or, is it A or B? I don’t know! AHHHH! My life is over! It’s not. You just need to study smarter, not harder. This is where INTERLEAVING comes in handy.
Interleaving is a technique used to improve not your ability to initially learn a skill or knowledge, but your ability to remember it for a much longer period of time. Traditionally, you might be tempted to focus on one skill or bit of knowledge, mastering it before you move on to something else (this is called blocking). Think about learning a sport, like baseball. First you might learn batting, then fielding, and then throwing. Sticking to one area of skill until you could do it perfectly. This way of “studying” has more rewards in the short term, but less and less over time. That is why you are able to remember so much on Tuesday, but not on Friday. Unfortunately, that reinforcing feeling of remembering so much on Tuesday is why blocking is perceived as a good strategy.
Interleaving is a process where learners mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve their learning. Interleaving is hard to get used to. The immediate payoff isn’t that great on Tuesday because you bounced around so much from content area to content area, and that is why people don’t think it works. It takes time to reap the benefits of interleaving and many people don’t like trading the security of knowing something for 24 or 48 hours. However, INTERLEAVING WORKS.
Birnbaum et al. (2013) wanted to see if interleaving really was better than blocking, so they had a bunch of people learn about birds. First, they took a group of people and showed them 6 birds for 8 different species. Six pictures of finches, six of orioles, six of swallows, and so on. This was the blocking group. Think AAABBBCCC. In the next group, they showed them one bird example at a time in a ABCABC fashion. The groups were then tested over how well they could distinguish between each species. The group that used interleaving answered almost twice as many questions correctly than the blocking group did when distinguishing between different groups of birds. The researchers hypothesized that the constant change made the small details of the animals more noticeable (they were focusing more on the differences between species, in other words) and made it easier for the interleaving group to quickly figure out which species the bird belonged to. I saw the pictures; trust me when I say that this was not an easy task! That is the power of interleaving! The blocking group had more trouble seeing the differences between the groups. If you take a lot of multiple-choice tests, this could help you take more of the guesswork out of those hard-to-decide questions. A or B or C? You may not have as much trouble in the future if you leverage the power of interleaving.
The best part about interleaving is that it is almost a universal aid in learning. From surgeons, baseball players, mathematicians, and figure skaters, all the way down to children learning how to read, interleaving can help anyone learn more efficiently and remember the thing (whatever the thing is!) for a longer period of time. Remember that if you switch too often or don’t practice enough, you won’t get as much benefit out of interleaving. The payoff will be worth it!
References
Birnbaum, M. S., Kornell, N., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2013). Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval. Memory & cognition, 41 (3), 392-402.
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.
Zulkiply, N., & Burt, J. S. (2013). The exemplar interleaving effect in inductive learning: Moderation by the difficulty of category discriminations. Memory & Cognition, 41(1), 16-27.