Learning a new skill is difficult for the best of us, particularly as we age *sighs*…..but there is a simple strategy you can try which can help you to learn more efficiently.
Simply by mixing up the way you learn with interleaving, you can experience large gains in your learning.
Interleaving means practising or learning different skills in quick succession. Often when learning, we traditionally focus on learning one task at a time. For example, if I was learning to play a new song on the guitar, I might spend an entire practice session on the one song only…. but if I was interleaving, I might practice multiple techniques in a practice sessions – for example, scales, fingerpicking, or even work on a few different songs in the same session.
A study by Rohrer et al., 2015, showed that children learning maths who used interleaving, performed 25% better than students learning one technique at a time (such as spending an entire lesson on fractions!), one day later. A month later the children were re-tested, and the interleavers performed 76% better than students practising one task at a time.
The implications of this are that whether you are learning a new skill, such as learning to play golf, or going back to university for further education, by shaking up how you practice and learn, you can learn much better.
You might feel stuck when learning a particular task or skill, but by moving on to a different task in the same session, it may actually help you to learn the first one!!
Do you interleave? What works best for you when learning a new skill?
Appreciate this post. Will try it out.