Staying With Standard Study Methods or Interleaving?

By Abby Mitchell

Entering college can be stressful, overwhelming, and confusing. Often you are bombarded with so much information in so little time. You may be told by different professors about various study tips like making flashcards, using Quizlet, highlighting main points, and much more. What if I told you there is a compressed and more effective way to learn? You could use interleaving. 

So What is it?

Interleaving is a strategy that will be a game changer when studying for your courses. Interleaving essentially boosts the ability to remember information more effectively for both short-term and long-term memory. To use this method, you must understand how it works. (1)Interleaving is the process of grouping different categories or topics together to better your recall and improve your understanding of a subject. For example, a student can select different subsections of a subject to study at once. When studying Math, you would choose between the topics within your course – such as statistics, algebra, and geometry, to study during your session. Study each topic for 20 minutes and at the end of studying reflect and review each topic for a few minutes to refresh your memory. 

So why does this work?

Evidence gained from researchers trying to help early career professionals improve their ability to learn and do their job effectively, have found reasons showing how interleaving helps us learn. (2) It was identified that by mixing areas of a topic together and learning them at once, forces the brain to understand the relationship between these topics and our brains automatically find the simple meaning of each and why they are tied together. (3) Another way interleaving assists is as it allows us to remember information on a topic for much longer than using standard study methods. This is shown through a study where forty students were asked to learn course content and do weekly and end of month tests on the information. The students who used the interleaving method performed much better on the month end test then their peers using common study methods such as blocking. (4)The blocking method can be described as breaking down your content into smaller blocks/chunks that you focus on mastering and understanding fully before moving on to a related topic within that same subject. The blocking method means you need to focus on a topic and spend time mastering it until you move in. This means it could take longer than you expect and you may not be done in the timeframe you set. Along with this, the blocking method will see an individual possibly forgetting the information more easily in the long run as you are not getting back to the topic after you finish studying it. 

Interleaving vs other study methods

One study that researchers Kang and Pashler conducted was the idea of spacing which does not relate to the method of grouping topics in the subject you are learning. (5) To test that this was a better method, they used pictures of butterflies and birds to test the brain’s memory. They would mix the different butterflies and birds and have the individuals try and remember each one first with no breaks in going through them and then with a break in between. During this study it was found that having breaks in between studying ended up negatively impacting the brain and its retention of topics when mixing categories This was still found true even if the total time of studying stayed the same throughout. In this case, interleaving is seen as superior since it engages the students learning in one session with no breaks in between, while spacing breaks up your study session. Breaking up study sessions lead to delayed attention to material and more laid back time in each section that was studied. As students and humans outside the classroom it is important to note that the interleaving study method can work outside the classroom as well. It can be applied to learning sports, instruments or any other topic. Learning cords while learning musical notes for piano is an example of how you can mix things up and apply the interleaving method to better learn anything you want in life. 

Conclusion

Altogether you can see why interleaving is a helpful study method to use while you transition into that college-level coursework! While blocking and spacing may seem like the easier way out, using interleaving will help you remember the information better in the long run. As you can see throughout this, all the other study methods lead to you quickly forgetting what you just learned and forcing you to come back to that information constantly. Interleaving, however, helps you understand what you are studying clearly and also helps you retain that information in your brain without constantly coming back to it.

(1) Nakata, T., & Suzuki, Y. (2019). Mixing grammar exercises facilitates long‐term retention: Effects of blocking, interleaving, and increasing practice. Modern Language Journal, 103(3), 629–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12581

(2)Van Hoof, T. J., Sumeracki, M. A., & Madan, C. R. (2022). Science of learning strategy series: Article 3, interleaving. The Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions, 42(4), 265–268. https://doi.org/10.1097/ceh.0000000000000418

(3)Sun, Y., Shi, A., Zhao, W., Yang, Y., Li, B., Hu, X., Shanks, D. R., Yang, C., & Luo, L. (2022). Long-lasting effects of an instructional intervention on interleaving preference in inductive learning and transfer. Educational Psychology Review, 34(3), 1679–1707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09666-5

(4)Park, J., Varma, K., & Varma, S. (2023). The role of executive function abilities in interleaved vs. blocked learning of science concepts. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1199682

(5)Birnbaum, M. S., Kornell, N., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2013). Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval. Memory & Cognition, 41(3), 392–402. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-012-0272-7