https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/quality-homework-a-smart-idea.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
> Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information > feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. > When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra > effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This > phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively > that psychologists have devised all manner of “desirable difficulties” to > introduce into the learning process: for example, sprinkling a passage with > punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out letters, shrinking font size > until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s being copied so that words > come out blurry. > > Teachers are unlikely to start sending students home with smudged or > error-filled worksheets, but there is another kind of desirable difficulty — > called interleaving — that can readily be applied to homework. An interleaved > assignment mixes up different kinds of situations or problems to be > practiced, instead of grouping them by type. When students can’t tell in > advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required > to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the > solution, and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly. > > Researchers at California Polytechnic State University conducted a study of > interleaving in sports that illustrates why the tactic is so effective. When > baseball players practiced hitting, interleaving different kinds of pitches > improved their performance on a later test in which the batters did not know > the type of pitch in advance (as would be the case, of course, in a real > game). > >Interleaving produces the same sort of improvement in academic learning. A >study published last year in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology asked >fourth-graders to work on solving four types of math problems and then to take >a test evaluating how well they had learned. The scores of those whose >practice problems were mixed up were more than double the scores of those >students who had practiced one kind of problem at a time. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en.
