The Proper Way to Study

            As college students, it’s more common than not to see fellow intellectuals cramming for their exam that could be next week, in a couple days, or even the next day. We have been told over and over that spacing out studying is more beneficial and will yield higher learning capabilities and grades. But just how beneficial is it?

            

             In the article titled “Cognitive Science Meets Pre-Algebra”, published by the New York Times, it follows the study conducted by Robert A. Bjorck. A psychologist from the University of California, Los Angeles, him and his team found that interleaved studying, where one mixes sets of related things, greatly improves

people’s ability to learn and recall information in comparison to blocked learning. The study focused on an experiment conducted on seventh graders at Liberty Middle School in Tampa, Florida. These middle school students were given homework assignments mixing different mathematical concepts they had learned, rather than applying blocked lessons on distinct topics. The results found that the students’ scores significantly increased in their exam grades, and their learning in the material was overall much greater due to this interleaving study method.

            

              Dr. Barbara Knowlton, in her talk at Loyola University Chicago on her study “Brain-behavior correlates of optimized learning through interleaved practice”, explains how interleaved learning has higher success rates than blocked learning. With interleaved material, the individual makes connections between the new information to material one has already learned, thus strengthening the understanding of the concepts. These connections will allow for a significant improvement in recalling and retrieving the studied material. In the experiment, they found that faster response times and higher motor cortex excitability were found for the interleaved condition than the blocked condition, which is more indicative of enhanced memory and long-term retrieval.

            

               Using the results from both of these studies, it is clear that as students we should try to mix up our material. Educational institutions should also maybe consider implemented interleaved learning more so in their curriculum, and we just might see successful results.  

Works Cited:

Lin, Chien-Ho, Barbara J. Knowlton, Ming-Chang Chiang, Marco Jacoboni, Parima Udompholkul, Allan D. Wu. “Brain-behavior correlates of optimizing learning through interleaved practice.” NeuroImage 56.3 (2011): 1758-1772. Web.

Carey, Benedict. “Cognitive Science Meets Pre-Algebra.” The New York Times. The New York Times,  02 Sept. 2013. Web.