The skeleton for this blog series has been the book The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel Schwartz, Jessica Tsang and Kristen Blair at Stanford. As I am doing my prep work for my blog series where I include and adapt the ideas within my physics classroom there are a few chapters that don’t quite have a 1:1 connection. In the original book, the authors write chapter I for Imaginative Play. The research is a bit on the weaker side (causation or correlation?) and is focused on the youngest students and their social dynamics. Although we could absoultely discuss the ideas of imagination and creativity in the physics classroom (consider the utilization of movies like Interstellar, or the discussions that launch units in OpenSci ed, for example) I’m going to make the decision to stick to the strategies that I feel most confident discussion. So here I diverge from the text and we will discuss Interleaving.
Interleaving simply means that students are engaging in activities that require them to problem-solve out of the order in which they were taught and/or by jumping around in terms of ideas/topics within a practice set.
For example, perhaps you have a homework set that looks like this: 4 balanced force questions, 4 unbalanced force questions where the object is speeding up and 4 unbalaned force questions where the object is slowing down. Interleaved practice would jumble these questions up.
Another example of interleaving is that perhaps students are currently learning about momentum but on a particular problem they are asked to calculate force from a force diagam, then determine the impulse and solve for the change in kinetic energy. In this case students are interleaving entire topics.
The value of interleaving is at its best when implementing similar problems. This allows students to begin to focus on the problem solving structure, rather than the algorithm, and they can begin to notice subtle differences.
Physics.Teacher.Momma. 