Hello, my name is Michelle…and I’m a blocker!
It’s really been for my whole life. I’m not really sure how it all started, it’s just the way that I think I have always studied. Yes, I participate in massed and blocked practice. One of the recent turning points for me was listening to Dr. Robert Bjork’s lecture, How we learn versus how we think we learn. In his speech, Dr. Bjork stated, “conditions that produce forgetting, rather than undoing learning, create opportunities for additional learning”. How crazy is that! I thought that the whole point of studying and learning was to remember, not to forget.
However, through our course readings and videos, it has become clear that there are many empirical studies to back up what Dr. Bjork is saying. For example, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014) describe how learning, remembering, and forgetting work together to create durable learning.
“First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short-term memory into long-term memory, we much anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later” (75).
Therefore, incorporating desirable difficulties – like “spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice” - into the learning process can make “the learning stronger, precise, and enduring” (Brown et al, 2014, p. 85). We aren’t just talking about any difficulties here, they need to be desirable in that they increase long-term retention and transfer as a result of slowing the pace of learning.
When time or space is incorporated between practice sessions, forgetting happens. Therefore, retrieving that information from your memory requires more effort and results in enhanced long-term learning. Sure, short-term regurgitation of the information can be achieved using blocked practice, and…yes, I have previously been subject to illusions of comprehension as I have crammed for tests. What I didn’t understand is that the process of retrieving information from your memory actually modifies it (Bjork, 1975) and it is forever changed. When we transition knowledge to long-term memory we don’t typically forget it. If we don’t use that knowledge for a long time, we may have difficulty calling it up easily. However, the correct context can unleash those memories that we haven’t thought about in years.
Interleaving and variation mix up the context of practice creating a variety of associations between the new material and previous skills and knowledge. Therefore, our mental models become more flexible and enable us to transfer our learning to other situations, which is really the whole purpose of learning. Even though I have been provided evidence that these claims about spacing, interleaving, and learning in different contexts are empirically backed, it is difficult to break my old habit of massed and blocked practice. And yet, with your support, I know that I can make this change for stronger, more durable learning!
Your post made me think about the synergy of it all (forgetting, recall, cues, practice, etc.). The evidence of durable learning is uncovered in the stats, but is very difficult for us to observe - this makes change difficult. Thank you for being a guest author and contributing.
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