Finals is that time of year where the libraries and coffee halls are filled with students who are furiously studying, or cramming, in order to get the grade they want. Many students, like me, may start studying one week before the exam, yet notice that when they get to the day of the exam, there are things that they may not remember. I find it very ironic that even after studying for a week, they are things that I may not be able to recall on the exam.
Dr. Barbra Knowlton, in her research talk at Loyola, explains that block learning is not a good technique to study for an exam. She argues that the concept of interleaved practice may help people retain more information than learning the information repetitively. She argues that by rereading or looking at the same material or notecard for a long period of time, students may fail to recall and efficiently store that information in their memory. Summarizing, rereading,and highlighting your notes may not actually help you in retaining this information. Knowlton argues that the best way to study the material is to not doing cram-studying, and people should mix in their knowledge with what they learned in the past to understand the new material they are now learning. In interleaved studying, the person is constantly shifting their attention onto different materials and by studying like this the person is able to make more connections between the material, gain a better and deeper understanding of the content, and it may help in recalling or retrieving the information they studied on exams much better than blocked studying..
By showing comparisons of the fMRI between people who did interleaved and repetitive studies, Knowlton shows us that there is a major increase/excitability in premotor, medial frontal, inferior parietal, and sensorimotor region when people utilized interleaved techniques. In her experiment, those people who used interleaved techniques had to switch their attention between multiple tasks. She argues that using this technique also helped improves your short term memory, and there are greater neural changes than compared to repetitive studying.
This year, Scientific American released an article on how interleaved learning may benefit many students. The article explains that by practicing a mixture of skills instead of learning one skills at a time, many students retain the information for longer periods of time. This article indicated that with interleaved learning, students may be able to retain long-lasting skills in math. The article talks about a three-month study on students in the 7th grade and how interleaved techniques improved their math score by 76%. Students in the algebra class who had weekly quizzes and homework on a certain skills set retained less information than those students who were given homework problems that integrated past learned skills with the present material. By three months, all the students math scores went up. Like Knowlton’s research, this research done on middle school students also indicates that interleaved learning is the way to succeed.
So if your studying for a physics or language exam for your finals, try mixing up all the problems so that your not just memorizing the answers but you are truly understand the material on your own!
Works Cited
Lin, Chien-Ho (Janice), Barbara J. Knowlton, Ming-Chang Chiang, Marco Iacoboni, Parima Udompholkul, and Allan D. Wu. "Brain–behavior Correlates of Optimizing Learning through Interleaved Practice." NeuroImage 56.3 (2011): 1758-772. Web.
Pan, Stevan. "The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning." Scientific American. N.p., 14 Aug. 2015. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.
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