“The Robustness of the Interleaving Benefit”, 2021-12-01 ():
The interleaving effect is the counterintuitive finding that studying or practicing multiple concepts in a mixed-up order leads to better learning than does focusing on one concept at a time. This interleaving benefit has been shown to apply to a wide range of learning tasks, from learning motor skills to more cognitive concepts such as recognizing the painting styles of different artists or solving mathematics problems. However, because most studies focus on average effects, less is known about how the interleaving effect varies between individuals. Individual differences are practically important—as a teacher, you would not want to apply interleaving broadly if it would help only some students and put others at a disadvantage. In fact, in the motor skills literature, there is some evidence that incorporating interleaved practice is not as effective for complex skills or for novice learners—that initial blocked practice is required before incorporating interleaved practice.
We mimic low-complexity and high-complexity by varying the task demands, and then examine how learners with low and high working-memory capacity benefit from interleaving.
We did not find a reversal where blocking was more effective.
Finally, we ask if there is a subset of learners for whom interleaving is reliably not beneficial across multiple sets of learning materials.
There was not.
These findings together provide deeper insight into the generalizability and robustness of the interleaving effect. It adds to the literature, showing that interleaving does not just promote learning across different materials, but also across different learners.
Interleaving examples of to-be-learned categories, rather than blocking examples by category, can enhance learning.
We examine the reliability of the interleaving effect between-participants (Experiments 1 & 2) and within-participants (Experiment 3). As a between-participant effect, we examined a broad spectrum of working memory by both measuring individual capacity and manipulating the task demand.
The findings reveal a robust interleaving effect across the spectrum, eliminated only at the lowest and highest ends, but never reversed. In Experiment 3, we used an empirically defined source of potential heterogeneity by examining whether the size of the interleaving benefit a participant experiences on one set of stimuli predicts the size of the interleaving benefit that same participant experiences on 2 other sets of stimuli. It did not, with only a very small correlation between the 2 more similar stimuli sets.
Taken together, these results add to the burgeoning literature on the robustness of the interleaving benefit.
[Keywords: interleaving, category learning, sequencing, spacing, working memory]