Instructional Intervention Effects on Interleaving Preference and Distance During Self-Regulated Inductive Learning.

Interleaving (intermixing exemplars from different categories) is more effective in promoting inductive learning than blocking (massing exemplars from a given category together). Yet learners typically prefer blocking over interleaving during self-regulated inductive learning, highlighting the need to develop effective interventions to overcome this metacognitive illusion and promote learners' practical use of the interleaving strategy. Drawing on a sample of university students, three experiments examined the effects of an instructional intervention on (a) correction of metacognitive fallacies regarding the superiority of blocking over interleaving for inductive learning, (b) adoption of the interleaving strategy during self-regulated learning when learners are allowed to make study choices exemplar-by-exemplar, (c) classification performance, and (d) transfer of category learning across diverse domains. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that instructions about the benefits of interleaving over blocking improved metacognitive awareness of the efficacy of interleaving and enhanced self-usage of the interleaving strategy during learning of new categories. However, this intervention had negligible influence on interleaving distance and did not improve classification performance. Experiment 3 found that informing learners about the benefits of extensive interleaving, as compared to minimal interleaving or no interleaving, successfully increased interleaving distance and boosted classification performance, and the intervention effects transferred to learning categories in a different domain. These findings support the practical use of the instructional intervention in promoting self-usage of the interleaving strategy and highlight the important role of enlarging interleaving distance in facilitating inductive learning. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: Educators have endeavored to explore methods to enhance the efficiency of inductive learning. Intermixing exemplars from different categories produces superior learning outcomes than studying each category's exemplars in a blocked manner. However, most learners fail to appreciate the benefits of interleaving and prefer to studying exemplars in a massed schedule. Providing learners with individualized feedback on blocked versus interleaved performance and highlighting relevant findings from previous research can effectively enhance their awareness of the merits of interleaving and encourage them to adopt the interleaved strategy during self-regulated learning. When learners attempt to intersperse exemplars of a given category with those from many other categories, their inductive performance improves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]