Creating Opportunities for Effective Practice

Learning is Difficult

We all have been learners since we were infants, so you would think that we would know how to do well it by now. That is not the case...  The authors of Make It Stick start the book by reminding us that learning is difficult. In particular, they emphasize a few key ideas.

Learning is:

  • widely misunderstood
  • often counterintuitive
  • clouded with common illusions
  • effortful
  • reflective and iterative

Because many of us have been taught to do it poorly, we bring misconceptions and bad habits to the college classroom. Unless people are taught how to learn with techniques from research-based evidence, they are likely to keep making the same bad mistakes over and over again. And, because learning is hard work, many fall back to old habits even after they have been shown better ways to learn. 

 

Additional Resources

For a more thorough review the book's ideas, I would highly recommend Make It Stick, available for checkout from the TLC. 

Book cover for Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

 

There are lots of good resources to explore the concept of spaced, interleaved, and varied practice available. Here are a few easy to access articles and details:

What Makes Good Practice? 

Effective practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied. Let's examine each of these characteristics more in depth.

 

Principle #1: What is Spaced Practiced? 

The first trait of effective practice is spacing.  Opposite of  "massed practice" (also know as "cramming"), spaced practice spreads out learning and review over time. The authors point out: “how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. It is still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world?” (47). Rapid learning is most often forgotten quickly, while durable learning is more effortful and long-term. 

Students don't always understand those key distinctions, so it is crucial that faculty make them clear and create classes where durable learning is not just encouraged but also required to excel:

“Even in studies where the participants have show superior results from spaced learning, they don’t perceive the improvement they believe they learned better on the material where practice was massed” (47).

The reason for the superiority of spaced learning appears to be hardwired in our brains. “It appears that embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge - a process that unfolds over hours and may take several days” (49). Humans are also inclined to take the shortest path possible to our goal - using the quickest earning strategies available - rather than the most effective. We have to be convinced to put in the extra effort. 

 

How Can We Apply This Concept with Students? 

If you want to make sure that students create durable learning by spacing their study time, make sure that you deliberately address how spaced practice creates long-term learning; their past experiences with cramming and its short-term success can speak much more loudly than your brief suggestion about spaced learning on the first day or two of the quarter. Repeat loudly and often!

Here are some suggestions for practical application of spaced practice: 

  1. Review your course assessments pacing and schedule, like practice quizzes and other low-stakes formative assessments. Make sure that you have created a course that emphasizes (and values in your grading structure) return to previously learning material. 
  2. Scaffold the approach early in the quarter by building in early opportunities for spaced review. For example, you can offer a "Mini-Midterm" during the second week of the quarter (or at least, well before the first midterm). Allowing students to experience a low-stakes exam will not only help them check and see if their studying is working or not, but it will also reinforce the learning that has occurred up to that point. The more practice, the better. 
  3. Introduce the three or four note card/flashcard study approach.  (Links to an external site.)If students are comfortable with using study cards for their learning, encourage them to revise the traditional flashcard strategy of reviewing all the cards over and over in the same order. Have them create different stacks of cards that are studied at different rates. Perhaps they create three piles: one for info that they know well (a YES pile), one for information that they do not know yet (a NO pile), and information that they partially know (a MAYBE pile). Focusing on the NO and MAYBEs makes sense, and they don't necessarily need to study all three piles the same amount. But, adding some YES pile cards can help them repeatedly come back to key information and consolidate learning over time. Variations include breaking up study terms and topics into four piles and tackling one each day no matter its familiarity, ensuring a review every four days. Or, students can create unit/module piles from different parts of the course, adding in previously covered material to current study piles. 

If you have additional ideas about creating spaced practice opportunities, please share them on the discussion forum at the end of this chapter. 

Principle #2: What is Interleaving?

Different from blocked practice (one subject at a time), interleaving mixes the study of two or more subjects or skills. One way to imagine this is thinking about the discrete skills that make up learning any subject. For example, to master Spanish, students need to conjugate verbs, practice speaking, and learn vocabulary. Imagine that the time spent teaching and practicing verbs are represented below with "A," speaking is "B" and vocab is "C." 

BLOCKED practice would look like this: AAABBBCCC. Each unit it covered separately and in sequence.

INTERLEAVED practice would look like this: ABCABCABC. Verbs, speaking and vocab are mixed - interwoven - together. 

In the image below, the red sections represent instruction, the green and blue sections are different, related topics, and the lime green section after the red arrow represents the end of unit/module exam. 

https://learning2pto.com/what-is-interleaving-mixed-varied-practice/ Links to an external site.

By teaching all three skills at the beginning of the section, students don't learn them in isolation.

 

What is the Effect of Interleaved Practice? 

The research is clear - interleaving practice creates more durable learning. It is effortful to switch back and forth, and that seems to create more robust neural pathways.

In one study,  two groups of college students were taught how to find the volumes of four obscure geometric solids (wedges, spheroids, spherical cones, and half cones). One group practiced problems for each type separately (BLOCKED), and the other group mixed or INTERLEAVED them.

On the practice questions assigned, the BLOCKED group did better on the short-term, initial learning: the BLOCKED group answered 89% of the practice questions correct. The mixed or INTERLEAVED group only averaged 60% correct (49-50).

But, in the test for more durable knowledge a week later, the BLOCKED group performance was significantly lower: only 20% correct. The INTERLEAVED learners scored 63%. This is a 215% improvement on the longer exam (49-50). Initial learning may appear to be stalled by interleaving practice, but it pays off in the long run.

Is it a Challenge?

Here's the truth: mixing or interleaving practice can actually impede initial learning, but it boosts durable learning significantly. That will frighten some students (not to mention some faculty). If your goals and your courses are about long-term retention, the evidence is clear. 

Students are conditioned to blocked practice, so mixing things up before they have the opportunity to "master" one skill before moving on to the next will be challenging. Again, mixing or interleaving practice can slow initial learning, but it boosts durable learning significantly. It can be a struggle to get students on board, but the evidence is clear:

“But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it” (50).

 

How Do We Apply the Concept with Students? 

To better support student learning, we should communicate the importance of interleaving. Here's a few tips:

  • Directly communicate the benefits to students. Again, we have to address the fact that the familiar is not as effective as the new. I often share the general article “What Works, What Doesn't Links to an external site.” because it is student-focused and clear on the evidence. It uses a "Don't do this.. Try this instead" approach to substitute better study habits that the traditional highlighting and rereading. Additionally, the University of Arizona has some great interleaving-specific resources aimed at students at their U of A Links to an external site.site. Check out their video:

  • Model interleaving practice in labs, discussions, and lectures. Practice what you preach. It might feel difficult to change your lectures up and cover multiple skills or concepts partially before moving on to another, but you can rest assured that the evidence is clear that it results in better learning. 
  • Tell students to mix up their flashcards or review homework problems out of order. 
  • Tell students to take study breaks and switch their focus up often (30 - 45 min). Make sure that they understand that they should NOT use interleaving as an excuse to leave a difficult subject. 
  • Normalize the discomfort and difficulty of pausing and mixing. I can't stress enough the need to make sure that students understand this is a different approach and may cause stress and the appearance of less effective learning. If we don't focus on communicating this information, they will likely revert back to old habits quickly. 

Principle #3: What is Varied Practice?

While this approach to learning is closely connected with interleaving, varied practice aids in the transfer of learning from one situation to another. We can vary how we practice skills and knowledge  - from how students work with the skills in the classroom, to how homework and classwork reviews the skills, to how the skills are assessed - so that students are able to have more complex and deeper learning experiences with the course information. 

The evidence is clear that different parts of our brains are affected by varied and complex learning: “learning gained through the less challenging, massed form of practice is encoded in a simpler or comparatively impoverished representation than the learning gained from the varied and more challenging practice which demands more brain power and encodes learning in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (51- 52).

 

Why is Varied Practice Difficult?

Often in education, we are taught to learn in isolation. A chapter in a Math textbook might cover one subject in that chapter, with practice questions at the end that only practice that single formula or algorithm. Then, the next chapter starts a new formula or concept, again in isolation. Finally, the test comes along and the student is presented with many different problems all mixed together. They stress, asking Which formula should I use? Which chapter did it come from? When we reinforce that learning is isolated, students often focus on discrete unrelated skills instead of the big picture. 

Practicing the same skill from many different angles does require some creative thinking, both in the design of the instructor to the problem solving skills of the student. This is precisely why it is more effective - it requires more effort. 

 

How Does Varied Practice Work?

In particular, varied (and interleaved) learning teaches discrimination skills and conceptual knowledge. Rather than memorizing individual formulas, teaching Math students to review problems and, first, having to decide what type of problem it is and the different solutions that might work, and then moving to solving requires a higher level of understanding. It is easy to give a problem set to people who are expecting that set - when all of them use the same basic strategy to solve. While this kind of learning is important to build a good foundation, it is not the only type of learning that is needed.

Instead of memorizing a formula for a chapter, the characteristics of a painter, or the traits of a specific bird, varied learners presents lots of problems requiring different formulas, lots of paintings by different artists, or lots of different bird species. Varying practice allows learners to not only see commonalities, but also the differences as well. Discrimination skills and the ability to see nuances comes out of varied practice. 

Additionally, varied practice leads to better and deeper conceptual knowledge. This type of learning requires an understanding of interrelationships of basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together. Conceptual knowledge is required for classification (55). 

If our goals are to create problem solvers and critical thinking, varied practice is essential. 

 

How Do We Apply This Concept with Students?

If you want to make sure that students are varying their learning, here are a few suggestions and ideas:

  • Design learning assessments to test students on a variety of skills connected to the learning targets. And, please understand that I am NOT advocating for surprising students on the exam - telling them that they will be assessed one way but changing it to another. This is not about trickery. This is about preparing students for and practicing with them a variety of assessments for a specific skill. For example, you want students to understand how to measure distance is a basic Math lesson. Rather than designing all your practice questions to use addition to calculate distance, also include some subtraction or multiplication questions. If you teach music, don't just have students play the same passage from start to finish over and over again. Instead, vary the rate, the method (sing or hum as well as play), and location of the practice. 
  • Ask students to apply more familiar skills to a new context. The book uses many sports examples as great approaches to varying practice. Don't just have hockey players practice the one-touch pass in isolation. Run drills a variety of places on the ice and game scenarios that allow players to see the pass as a tool with multiple uses.