Long-Lasting Effects of an Instructional Intervention on Interleaving Preference in Inductive Learning and Transfer

Abstract

Observing category exemplars in an interleaved manner is more beneficial for inductive learning than blocked (massed) presentation, a phenomenon termed the interleaving effect on inductive learning.However, people tend to erroneously believe that massed is more beneficial than interleaved learning, and learners prefer the former during self-regulated learning. We report four experiments designed to investigate whether explicit instructions, which include individual performance feedback and the interleaving effect results from previous research, can (1) correct metacognitive illusions regarding the interleaving effect, (2) promote self-employment of interleaving, and (3) facilitate category learning. In addition, the current study explored (4) whether the intervention effect is long-lasting and (5) transferable to learning of categories in other domains. Experiments 1-4 established the effectiveness of the instruction intervention to enhance metacognitive appreciation of the interleaving effect, to promote self-employment of interleaving, and to facilitate learning of new categories. The intervention effect was long-lasting (at least 24 hours; Experiment 2), and transferable to learning of categories in different domains (Experiments 3 & 4). These findings support the practical use of the instruction intervention.

Optimizing self-organized study orders: combining refutations and metacognitive prompts improves the use of interleaved practice

“…Crucially, we observed this improvement in a learning task that required students to create their own study order. Although previous intervention studies revealed promising results 18 , these interventions took place in experimenter-controlled learning tasks, where students chose which strategy to implement as opposed to arrange the exemplars by themselves. Evidently, this prior research has difficulties in capturing the complexity of authentic learning situations, in which students make many small decisions to organize their learning materials instead of making one overall decision to (not) use interleaving.…”

“…For instance, when performance feedback is derived from immediate test scores, some students may obtain higher results with blocked practice, perform equally well, or obtain only a ‘small’ benefit of interleaved practice 47 . In such situations, performance feedback might fail to improve the use of interleaved practice 18 or have unintended negative consequences than positive outcomes, such as by reinforcing pre-existing erroneous beliefs 48 .…”

“…Pre-intervention task contained 36 paintings, six paintings by each of six artists, obtained from Khan and colleagues 56 . Post-intervention task contained 48 paintings, eight paintings by each of six artists (six paintings for studying and two paintings for assessment), previously used by Sun and colleagues 18 . Delayed-transfer task contained 48 bird images, eight images by each of six bird species (six images for studying and two images for assessment), previously used by the authors.…”

“…This research tested the efficacy of different instructional techniques, including theory-based minimal instructions, experience-based metacognitive prompts, performance feedback, or their combinations. In a recent study, Sun et al 18 provided students with minimal instructions and performance feedback. Students learned painting styles, using blocked and interleaved practice, and took part in a classification test.…”

“…Equally important is the uncertainty surrounding the true benefits of strategy interventions on learning outcomes. Earlier investigations into interleaved practice within experimenter-controlled learning tasks yielded a strong benefit of interleaved practice 17 , 18 . However, the results are mixed when students organized learning materials themselves: Some studies reported a positive correlation between the classification accuracy and interleaved practice (i.e., frequency of switch decisions) 37 , 38 ; while, other studies found no such correlation (Exp.…”