Thinking about Interleaving

Of all the learning practices we have discussed in this forum, I think interleaving is one of the most counter-intuitive to students. So many of our "practice" structures are based around grouped or massed practice: lots of problems that emphasize one content area or one skill, and then a lot of problems addressing another content area or skill, and so on. I know I have tended to think about students' development of concepts and skills as a directional arrow, starting at "beginning" and ending at "more expert." So it is not too surprising that students have this idea as well.

One example from my non-work life helped me to appreciate the wisdom of interleaved practice. Two of my children used a middle-school mathematics curriculum that intentionally utilized interleaved practice: each problem set consisted of 15 questions that were relevant to that section of the chapter, with 15 additional questions that were taken from any of the previous sections or chapters. I saw first-hand the effect of this structure when my kids started recognizing that they had to go back to previous sections of the book to remind themselves about a kind of problem they hadn't seen for a while. Oh, the complaints! But I was amazed at the growth in my kids' ability to recognize different types of problems, to characterize them, and to explain how two seemingly unrelated math topics were actually very related. That is the strength of interleaving.

My kids' experiences in math, my reading about learning, and the encouragement of a departmental colleague prompted me to make some changes in my own teaching. I had been dismayed at the tendency of students not to make connections between different biology topics taught in the same class. The mental model I had was that they practiced and mastered one topic (for this example, some aspects of protein structure) but then "put away" that understanding after taking an exam on it, in the same way you might pack up holiday decorations after the holiday has passed. I realized that my actions were promoting this disconnect. 

So, I borrowed from the math model and redesigned my course. Each weekly quiz and each exam in my Introductory Biology course is now cumulative. For each assessment, I try to choose or design problems that promote connections between topics that might not seem related to a novice. I don't yet have a feeling about whether this has improved students' understanding of the material, but several of them told me they were not as intimidated by the looming cumulative final exam as they might have been, because they have been working with all the concepts and skills, all semester. In my experience, that alone is a win.

Revisiting Learning Outcomes Mid-Semester

I really like transparency in the way we teach students. In particular, and this relates to Zoe's post of "Why", I like to share with my classes what motivates me to teach a course: the learning outcomes. We all have them in our syllabi, but these mostly don't get revisited with the students after the first day of class. Today I dedicated part of my HNRS 170 class to sharing the learning outcomes again with my students, then reviewing which outcome we've reinforced so far with a given class activity.

Now, from an assessment standpoint I don't yet have a metric to go by for evaluating this, but I believe it is a good practice for aligning where we are as a class in the semester with the syllabus, and giving the students a sense of progress. What is your perspective?

Why?

Why?

 It’s a question that seems both too simple and amazingly complex. Children start asking “why?” as soon as they start noticing their surroundings. “Why is the sky blue?”, “Why is that man fat?”, “Why do I need to eat Brussel sprouts?”.  So, what happens during young adulthood (and beyond) that stops this? And why?

Elaboration is the “why” in making connections between material students are learning in the classroom and the world around them. These questions encourages them to think more deeply about the material, and explore connections. This increases learning of the material, retrieval, as well as the knowledge that “stuff covered in class” has greater meaning.

Many of us work under the illusion that students are doing this on their own. It seems as if any student would ask “why is my professor telling me this?”…but perhaps that is an artifact of our knowledge of the subject. It’s easy for us to see the connections between what we are sharing and the bigger picture.

But ask your students (either in class or during office hours) “why did we cover ________ in class”, and you might get a very different response.

How do we model Elaboration in the classroom? How do we train students to do this on their own? Why???