Cognitive Science Meets Pre-Algebra

The New York Times:

The math students at Liberty Middle School were not happy. The seventh graders’ homework was harder and more time-consuming at first, and many of the problems seemed stale. They were old, from weeks or months ago — proportions, again? — and solving them interrupted the flow of the students’ current work.

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“The result is that you feel you’ve learned the material really well; people prefer blocked practice, when you ask them,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But they do much better on later tests when they practiced interleaved, or mixed, sets of problems or skills. It’s completely counterintuitive.”

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The researchers started small: eight seventh-grade pre-algebra classes, 140 students in all. “We didn’t introduce anything new, or ask teachers to do any additional work,” said the lead investigator, Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida and a former math teacher himself; his co-authors were Robert F. Dedrick and Kaleena Burgess. “We simply rearranged the material they already use.”

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“But I’m much more concerned with how these lab-based techniques interact with everything else in the classroom: the different dynamics, different kids, different teaching styles. For example, some percentage of teachers are going to say, ‘This doesn’t fit with how I teach math.’ Period. A lot of other people are simply not going to grasp what’s required to make it work. The question is: Is it adaptable?”

Most psychologists who study learning think so. “Remember, learning is slower when you begin interleaving,” said John Dunlosky, a psychologist at Kent State University. “If you have both groups learn the material to the same level — that is, if you give the people doing interleaving a little extra time at the beginning — then the benefits of mixed practice will be even larger, I expect.”

Read the whole story: The New York Times