Interleaving, Metacognition and Children
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #133
Hello! A shorter update this week, but an interesting one, relating to the talk on interleaving that I mentioned last time.
Interleaving
I recently went to one of UCL’s online educational neuroscience talks. The focus was on interleaving, and the speaker was Professor David Shanks. I was really interested in the work that he shared, much of which was on younger learners – a real gap in the research literature – and on metacognition.
In general terms, Prof Shanks reported on recent work that supports the impact of the interleaving effect. The experimental work has shown that young children also benefit from interleaving like adults do (see update #14 for more); it’s a consistent effect (over blocked practice).
One forthcoming study gave children from Grade 1 to Grade 5 examples of penguin species to learn. As expected, they learned the species better if their practice was interleaved, which meant that they switched frequently from exemplars of one species to exemplars of another. The goal, of course, was for the children to learn to reliably identify species correctly.
The researchers also looked at metacognition. Bear in mind that learners typically misjudge the interleaving effect (e.g., Yan et al., 2016), assuming that blocking is the better strategy.
Interestingly, this new research found that very young children (Grade 1) were more likely to interleave than their older peers (Grade 5). This meant that metacognitive judgements and control got worse as the children got older. The researchers found a similar pattern when parents were asked to plan a practice order for their children: it was more likely to feature blocked practice as the children got older.
I wonder if this in some way reflects a tendency towards disorder and exploration in learning with very young, with greater categorisation and explicit, defined goals tending to appear later, and culturally assumed to be appropriate...? It’s interesting to speculate.
You can watch the video of the talk at this link (YouTube).
One other thing to mention is that I have an on-campus CPD session on evidence-informed classroom questioning. Find out more and sign up below:
Evidence-Informed Classroom Questioning – 19 February, Glasgow
You can get an idea of what to expect from the session by referring back to update #105!
All the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
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