The Counterintuitive Nature of Effective Learning Strategies

Effective learning strategies sometimes go against our human instincts about conversation.

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Interleaving and spaced repetition help students maximize their learning speed and retention. However, when using these strategies while teaching, they can feel counterintuitive.

Why? Because they go against our human instincts about conversations.

During a conversation, people generally want to focus on a single thought, explore it to its fullest extent, and completely finish the thought before moving on to other things. We converse depth-first.

But interleaving and spaced repetition are about stopping the flow of thought, doing other things for a while, and then coming back to remember the flow of thought just before you’ve forgotten it. Breadth-first, not depth-first.

Granted, when creating content for a course, it’s easiest to proceed in the form of a story and “close the loop” each time before moving on and opening another loop. That’s how to create good content, but it’s not how the content should be presented.

It’s natural to think that teaching should mirror content creation, but in reality, they should be very different.

The breadth-first nature of interleaving and spaced repetition gives rise to a handful of other interesting consequences.

For instance, you need to create (or, at the very least, outline) most of your course’s content prior to teaching any of it.

Likewise, you end up covering topics in an unconventional yet highly efficient manner – for instance, in a calculus course, teaching many tests for convergence before teaching integration.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that learners should be switching to a different topic every other minute while first learning the material. That would be excessive.

What I’m saying is: imagine taking the usual week-long or month-long units that a traditional classroom marches through, and chopping those up into mini-segments that are cohesive yet scoped down to 10-20 minutes, and interleaving through those segments. A 60-minute class period would cover about 15 minutes across each of 4 different units.

So, in the “train of thought” lingo: instead of completing the full train of thought which takes a week or a month, you’re splitting it up into cohesive mini-thoughts which each span just 10-20 minutes, and interleaving through those.

That’s our approach at Math Academy. Students work through one full topic at a time. The topics are bite-size, atomic, consisting of about 3 or 4 “knowledge points” of increasing difficulty, each knowledge point consisting of 2-5 practice questions depending on a student’s performance. Students go through these individual topics one at a time but the learning paths through future topics are interleaved.

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