People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true. — Robert A. Bjork
According to Robert A. Bjork who is the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab and a distinguished professor of psychology, interleaving skills is better than focusing exclusively on one skill at a time in order to increase success in long-term performance.
Interleaving gives the brain a better workout because mixing tasks provides just enough stress to trigger the release of a hormone called corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) in the hippocampus, the brain area central to memory and learning. CRF strengthens synapses. During blocked practice, by contrast, you’re not reloading your circuitry by trying different tasks, you’re under less stress, and your brain is bored and less engaged.
Interleaving is a technique discovered by sports researchers, beginning in the 1960s and has been described as varied practice, variable practice, and mixed practice. They found that athletes sharpened their skills, whether hitting a baseball or a badminton serve, most quickly when they practiced them in mixed sets. Interleaved practice is a proven technique to increase your ability to learn and retain all kinds of knowledge and skills.
When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave — that is, alternate between — the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer-lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
– “How to learn better at any age – You’re studying wrong. But don’t worry, it’s not too late to get much, much better.” By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel (The Boston Globe, March 9, 2014)
If you want to help your child learn faster and better, perhaps you should start incorporating the interleaving technique into his practice.
AJ SOCCER 