Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Interleaved practice involves mixing problems of different types within assignments and distributing problems of the same type over time. A recent classroom randomized study conducted by Rohrer et al. (2020) reported large learning effects of interleaved practice relative to blocked practice. In the present study, we test whether we can replicate the effects of Rohrer et al. (2020) while also systematically extending the interleaved intervention to enhance its suitability for educational contexts. We report on results of two of three planned cohorts (n=813 middle-school students across 8 districts), and find that the interleaved condition outperforms a blocked condition (g=.18, p<.05). Implementation analysis and a cost analysis suggest that the intervention can be implemented with fidelity at low cost to schools. We discuss implications of these findings as well as the broad challenge of translating learning research to practice.