Interleaving | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to a series inserting effects for gcse's nail lovers so before looking at ways to implement active recall and space repetition i will briefly mention another learning technique called interleaving before we begin do bear in mind that much of the research into this technique has it gone into using it with math and science and not so much for the humanities as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video

so when studying we can naturally default to grouping activities together and focusing on one thing for long stretches of time for example say you're at gcse and wanted to practice quadratics you may think it's better to do 10 questions than factorizing quadratics than doing number 10 on using the quadratic formula and then maybe another 10 on sketching quadratics and this is known as blocked practice but turns out that research shows that it's better to mix up all those problems and this is known as interleaving in short interleaving is essentially the opposite of blocked practice rather than dedicating long stretches of time to one particular skill it's often better to vary the skills and ideas you're covering in one study session and this doesn't just apply to studying it also applies to practicing music and sports to take the study from 1986 for example in which 30 students were learning free badminton's long shorts and drive serves in either a blocked order or a random order for three days a week for five weeks it turned out that the random group who had mixed up the three types of serves performed better than the students who didn't despite both groups spending the same amount of time practicing but since

we're not really here for sports let's look at some studies measuring the effectiveness of leaving for studying take this study from 2007 in which students were taught how to calculate the volumes of different shapes the students had two practice sessions separated by week and during each session they were given a lesson on how to find the volumes of four different types of shapes the students in the blogs practice group first had a lesson finding the volume of some shape then immediately did four problems then had another lesson then did four more problems and so on meanwhile the interleaved group had four lessons and then had to complete a mixed set of problems at covering content from all those four lessons across the first session it was found that the blocked practice group did much better on the questions because they were scoring almost 90 percent whereas interleaved group scored around 60 but then in a test conducted a week later with new and unfamiliar problems the interleaved group again scored about 60 but the blocks group's performance dropped to about 20 which means that the interleaved group outperformed the blocked group by almost 40 percent and looking at the results the researchers thought the reason that the interleaved group did better was because interleaved practice allowed the students to better discriminate between different types of problems so we're more likely to use the correct method in each one and this makes sense if you think about it if you were learning about the sine rule in maps and were given 10 questions then you would know that you had to use the sine rule for all 10 of them and if you then talk the cosine rule i will give an additional 10 questions it's clear that you had have to use the cosine rule for all time inverse as well but if you were taught both and were given a mix of questions then it requires more thinking for you to figure out when to use which rule and this can help aid your understanding also by mixing up problems you're using active recall more often if you did 10 questions on the sign rule then you would only have to recall the sign wheel once because when you move in onto the next problem it would still be in your working memory but by moving on to another question and then going back to the sign real question you'll be recalling the sign realm more often as you will be having pauses in between this all means leaving and varying the problems we are doing allows us to build new connections and helps us to consolidate the newly learned information into our long-term memory more easily all that said there have been a few studies which have shown that the benefits of using interleaving is only rather small over similar time frames so previously mentioned study nevertheless the researchers still say that the technique shows promise based on much of a research but further research still has to be done to understand interleaving in more detail and how its benefits vary based on dosage student ability and the difficulty of material so whilst more research still needs to be done the researchers say that into leaving may still be useful to many students especially when it comes to math problems and mixing them up they believe

many students don't use it because only a few textbooks seem to mix up problems with ones which have been covered earlier also when you learn about a topic in class you're often given a set of problems which use that topic because the hope that many teachers have is that if you repeat something enough times and it will stick which as we've established is not always true personally i think that interleaving is the best leader to math and science problems but i enjoyed using further subjects as well because it did make revision a bit more interesting as you're doing a few more topics in one study session rather than focusing on a single topic

the question then comes how should we best incorporate into leaving and whilst much further research has to be done to fully understand it i think that we can still use existing research to make some small changes to how we study rather than mindlessly and repeatedly practicing a single topic or skill it can be helpful to mix up with other topics and skills which can help train you to recognize the problem type and determine the best approach for that type of problem for example say you were learning about integration by parts during a level rather than doing 10 questions all integration by parts it can be helpful to mix up those problems with normal integration and integration by substitution and gradually doing these problems will add to your understanding and help you realize when to use which method of integration or if you start teaching yourself a few topics after learning one topic it can be helpful to practice one or two problems on that topic to make sure you understand it and after learning the next topic you can attempt a problem to you on the next topic as well as in one or two problems from the first topic that you just learned about to interleave all these problems together so interleaving problems on the current topic with problems covered in the previous topics can not only make sure your revision is more interesting but also improve your ability to distinguish between different types of problems but do remember that doing past papers is also an excellent way to do this they also give you a chance to train your ability to distinguish between different ideas and topics so you can pick out the one which is most relevant for the question at hand for me personally i found interleaving to be most effective when doing challenging maths and physics problems at a level if i was stuck when doing a problem rather than giving up and looking at the solution i did a problem on something completely different and when i came back to the first problem sometimes my brain had figured out uh in the background what was going on and allowed me to see their solution much more easily whilst i was doing the second problem

ultimately the researchers said that interleaving was a medium utility and said that on the positive side interleaved practice has shown to have relatively dramatic effects on students learning and retention of mathematical skills and teachers and students should consider adopting it in appropriate contexts also interleaving does help and rarely hinders overcounter cognitive skills on the negative side the literature on interleaving is currently small but it contains enough null effects to raise concern although the nil effects may indicate the technique does not work consistently well they may also reflect that we do not fully understand the mechanisms underlying the effects of interleaving and therefore do not always use it appropriately they then go and say that more research needs to be done to iron out any small specific areas of interleaving in which the research is lacking anyways that's it for this video and i'll see in the next one