Students’ decisions to switch between categories or stay within them are related to practice classification performance

Abstract

How exemplars are ordered – blocked or interleaved - can play a critical role in later classification performance. Even so, when students self-regulate their learning, they typically block their study by choosing to stay within the same category on subsequent trials. Our goal was to evaluate the degree to which such decisions to stay within a category are influenced by performance on the previous practice trial. In five experiments, participants learned to classify categories of rocks by completing practice classification trials, receiving feedback, and making decisions about what to study on the next practice trial. The rate of stay choices was influenced by feedback type, a preceding familiarity trial, and location in the list. Most importantly, stay rates were low following correct classification demonstrating a preference to interleave study. By contrast, stay rates substantially increased following incorrect classification. Thus, practice classification performance and subsequent study decisions during complex categorical learning tasks can be strongly related.