To Apply Interleaving, Try This Set of Steps
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #97
This week, a little more guidance on interleaving.
To remind you, interleaving means scheduling contrasting examples or questions together, rather than doing ‘blocks’ of similar items. I wrote about it last time. In fact, I’ve really written a lot about this specific technique! If you want to dig deeper, here are a few examples:
This 2019 blog post, which contrasts interleaving with spacing and retrieval.
The Context and Implications document that accompanies my co-authored systematic review.
My chapter in the ResearchED Guide to Cognitive Science
The archive of this newsletter! See update #14, update #96.
But now, as promised, a guide to help with applying interleaving to your teaching. What follows are some specific steps I haven’t covered in the previous writings!
Using interleaving
First, you need to figure out what you are going to be using interleaving for. What are your students learning? Which topics or tasks will be the focus?
Studies of interleaving fall into two main categories in terms of what they focus on: new learning and consolidation. I have tended to call these interleaved learning (for new material) and interleaved practice (e.g., doing math practice problems after the skill or concept was first studied in a more traditional way).
The main distinction is whether the concepts or skills are new to the students when they see the interleaved material. If students got a lesson on multiplying fractions last week and today they are doing practice, it’s the latter. But if you are introducing a new conceptual idea and providing some illustrative examples, it’s the former.
Either way, interleaving involves some alternating or shuffling of contrasting examples, as discussed last week.
Apply interleaving to your teaching
To apply interleaving, try this series of steps:
Identify concepts that students find hard to understand, or where they often make errors.
Think about what examples or tasks would be a useful stimulus for practice. Typically, these examples will be quite brief, e.g. words, images, sentences or very short passages, short tasks, or questions.
Analyse current practice materials that you use, and think about whether blocked practice is being used. If so, you could consider changing this.
Where relevant, modify the order of presentation, so that the examples are now interleaved.
Ensure that the emphasis is on comparing and contrasting subtle differences, and that the contrast happens close together in time (not in separate lessons).
As the students get better at the task, shift the contrast to be more subtle and challenging to recognise. The type of task or the type of example could be varied, and you could also increase the number of categories (e.g. the work of multiple artists rather than just two or three). This will increase the difficulty, so only do it when they appear secure in what they have learned so far.
Overall, interleaving is a desirable difficulty (See update #10). It boosts retention and transfer by helping students to notice meaningful differences between items or problems.
However, this can also mean that it’s not intuitive to learners or teachers! Take time to consider where you can build it in to lessons. Once you’ve done so two or three times, the opportunities will get much more obvious in future.
Have fun! I hope the set of steps helps. And all the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
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