Interleaving

Suppose you want to improve your golf game—say, driving and putting. If you’re like most people, you would practice all of your driving and then all of your putting (or vice versa) before calling it a day. This is called blocked practice because the separate to-be-learned skills—driving and putting—are practiced in large chunks, or blocks. Like massed practice, blocked practice might produce rapid short-term gains, but those gains will quickly disappear. Interleaving the two skills—in this case, by practicing some driving, then some putting, then back to driving, and then back to putting—would produce much better long-term learning than blocked practice, even if the total amount of time spent practicing in both cases is the same.

From: Lasting Learning


Last modified: May 19, 2021