Interleaved learning with verbal materials

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Interleaving exemplars of different categories compared to presenting exemplars of each category in a blocked fashion seems to be a simple but powerful way to improve inductive learning at school. Although a consistent advantage of interleaving has been demonstrated for certain types of materials (such as naturalistic paintings and other visual materials), the results for verbal materials, such as single words or expository texts, are mixed. Moreover, all studies conducted to date have been based only on adult learners and have used only immediate or slightly delayed assessments of learning outcomes. Therefore, the extent that the acquisition of lasting knowledge can be improved by using interleaved learning schemes with verbal materials in school children is unknown. The present project will contribute to closing this research gap by focusing on three typical learning objectives that rely on induction and verbal materials: (1) The acquisition of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in beginning readers, (2) the acquisition of spelling rules, and (3) the acquisition of conceptual knowledge based on verbal descriptions of exemplars. Theories of sequential effects in inductive learning, such as the sequential theory of attention, highlight conditions that influence the effects of an interleaved presentation of exemplars. Interleaving should be more effective than blocking when the different categories are difficult to discriminate, and comparisons between categories are therefore crucial for grasping the category structure. In contrast, blocking should be more effective when commonalities of exemplars belonging to the same category are more important. The first aim will be to clarify whether interleaved learning with verbal materials of different complexity, focused on different types of knowledge (phonological, orthographic, and semantic knowledge), is more effective than blocked learning when the conditions of high between-category similarity and low within-category similarity are fulfilled. The secondary aim of the proposed research will be to examine the role of instructional support. Experimental studies on mathematics learning suggest that instructional support might be an important moderator of the effect of interleaving in school settings. Teaching relevant comparison strategies and prompting students to use these strategies in interleaved learning might increase the benefits of interleaving and the number of students that actually profit from interleaving. The third aim is to examine the role of interleaving for lasting learning by varying the retention interval from immediately after learning to eight weeks and up to one year. Finally, we will also collect measures of learning processes to explore what learners do to benefit from interleaving, with a focus on dynamics of the learning process that indicate discrimination and comparison between exemplars.