阅读理解
We've all heard the saying: practice makes prefect! In other
words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go
about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play
the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning
pianist might rehearse scales(音阶) before chords(和弦). A young tennis player practices the
forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking”， and because it is common and easy to
schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other
settings.
However another strategy promises improved results. Enter “interleaving”， a largely unheard-of technique that is
catching the attention of cognitive(认知) psychologists and neuroscientists.
Blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, “skill A” before “skill B” and so on, forming the pattern “AAABBBCCC”), while in interleaving one mixes
practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern “ABCABCABC”).
Over the past four decades, a small but growing body of
research has found that interleaving often outperforms blocking for a variety
of subjects, including sports and category learning. Yet there have been almost
no studies of the technique in unplanned, real world settings-until recently.
New research in schools finds that interleaving produces dramatic and long-lasting
benefits for an essential skill: math. Not only does this finding have the
potential to transform how math is taught, it may also change how people learn
more generally.
Researches are now working to understand why interleaving
produces such impressive results. One important explanation is that it improves
the brain's ability to tell apart between concepts. With blocking, once you
know what solution to use, or movement to do, the hard part is over. With
interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote(死记硬背) responses don't work. Instead, your
brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That
process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and
concepts, which then better enables you to select and produce the correct
response.
A second explanation is that interleaving strengthens memory
associations. With blocking, a single strategy，temporarily held in short-term memory,
is sufficient. That's not the case with interleaving-the correct solution
changes from one practice attempt to the next. As a result, your brain is
continually engaged at regaining different responses and bringing them into
short-term memory. Repeating that process can strengthen neural connections
between different tasks and correct responses, which improves learning.
Both of these accounts imply that increased effort during
training, either to discriminate correct responses or to strengthen them, is
needed when interleaving is used. This corresponds to a potential drawback of
the technique, namely that the learning process often feels more gradual and
difficult in the beginning. However, that added effort can have better,
longer-lasting results.
