{"id":6665821,"date":"2025-10-12T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/?p=6665821"},"modified":"2025-10-09T12:37:04","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T17:37:04","slug":"interleaving-meets-prequestioning-a-powerful-combination-for-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/interleaving-meets-prequestioning-a-powerful-combination-for-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Interleaving Meets Prequestioning: A Powerful Combination for Learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A few weeks ago, I wrote about an intriguing research question. We know that <strong>retrieval practice<\/strong> helps students learn. And we know that <strong>generative drawing<\/strong> helps students learn. So: what happens if we <em>combine <\/em>those two research-informed strategies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I <a href=\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/research-reality-check-more-is-better-doesnt-always-apply-to-learning-strategies\/\" data-type=\"post\" data-id=\"6664989\">wrote back then<\/a>, I think we have three answers to that question:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Answer #1: combining strategies didn&#8217;t help. Students remembered the same amount whether or not they <em>retrieved<\/em> as they <em>drew<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Answer #2: Wait a minute: I&#8217;m actually not so sure about answer #1. The &#8220;retrieval&#8221; in this study didn&#8217;t really match the typical definition of &#8220;retrieval practice.&#8221; The students recalled something they had <em>just read<\/em>, not something they had learned a few days before. In other words: they were &#8220;retrieving&#8221; from working memory, not from long-term memory. That&#8217;s not really retrieval practice.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Answer #3: although we <em>haven&#8217;t<\/em> learned the answer to the question&#8211;at least in my opinion&#8211;we <em>have<\/em> learned that research into combining strategies gets tricky.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve just come across another study asking a similar &#8220;is two better than one?&#8221; question. Here goes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>We know that <strong>jumbling practice on related topics together<\/strong> helps students learn. That is: rather than practice &#8220;adjectives&#8221; and &#8220;adverbs&#8221; separately, students benefit from doing practice questions on both topics together. (We call that approach &#8220;interleaving.&#8221;)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>And we know that <strong>asking students to answer questions before they have studied the answer<\/strong> helps students learn. (We call that technique &#8220;prequestioning&#8221; or &#8220;pretesting.&#8221;) <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Dr. Steven Pan and his colleagues <a href=\"https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/buy\/2025-31576-003\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/psycnet.apa.org\/buy\/2025-31576-003\">wanted to know<\/a>: does interleaving + prequestioning result in <em>more learning <\/em>than either strategy on its own? Or, the <em>same amount of learning<\/em>? <em>Less <\/em>learning?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s explore&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;What Is Bipolar Disorder?&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Using an online research platform, Pan and his colleagues asked adults to learn about six different mental conditions: ADHD, bipolar disorder, etc.. To learn this information, participants read short &#8220;case study&#8221; passages about three people with each condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Half of the participants read three <em>consecutive <\/em>passages about any one condition. That is: they read 3 passages about a person with schizophrena; then 3 about someone with autism; and so forth. (This structure is the opposite of &#8220;interleaving&#8221;; we call it &#8220;blocking.&#8221;)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The other half of the participants read those same passages&#8211;but all jumbled together. So, they might read a passage about someone with ADHD, then another about someone with schizophrenia, then another about someone with bipolar disorder. (Yup: this is &#8220;interleaving.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So: all the participants read the same 18 passages in groups of 3 passages. But half of the participants read them in &#8220;blocked&#8221; groups; the other half read them jumbled up in an &#8220;interleaving&#8221; structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So far, this research explores the relative benefits of <strong>blocking or interleaving<\/strong>. But what about the &#8220;<strong>prequestions<\/strong>&#8220;?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Within each of those groups, half of the participants saw the list of technical names for the six conditions that they&#8217;re learning about: &#8220;cyclothymic affect disorder,&#8221; &#8220;resonance development disorder,&#8221; &#8220;schismic cognition disorder,&#8221; and so forth. (The researchers deliberately chose obscure technical names so that participants couldn&#8217;t rely on prior knowledge\u2014they had to learn the associations from scratch.) Participants had to guess: which one of these six is the passage about?\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>They had to answer these questions <em>without having yet learned about the conditions<\/em>. That&#8217;s a &#8220;prequestion.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The other half saw the technical name at the top of each passage they were reading. So: a case study about bipolar disorder would be labeled &#8220;cyclothymic affect disorder.&#8221;\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>No prequestion here.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>With these groups and subgroups, Pan and Co. can now discover which combination helps students learn the most: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>It could be BLOCKING, with our without PREQUESTIONS<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It could be INTERLEAVING, with our without PREQUESTIONS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>To be extra careful, the researchers checked to see how much the participants learned five minutes later. And then &#8212; with a completely different group of participants &#8212; they checked to see how much they learned 48 hours later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">We&#8217;ve Got Answers (I&#8217;ve Got Questions)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Team Pan wanted to know: does combining interleaving (a structure) with prequestioning (a technique) increase learning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a word: YES. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Both right away and 48 hours later, these adults learned more about identifying cognitive disorders if they read jumbled case studies (&#8220;interleaving) and had to guess what each one was (&#8220;prequestioning&#8221;).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The group that read the case studies all clumped together (&#8220;blocking&#8221;) without prequestions learned the least.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>And the groups that <em>either <\/em>studied with interleaved case studies <em>or <\/em>answered prequestions scored in the middle &#8212; roughly the same as each other.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>On the one hand, this helpfully direct answer gives teachers useful guidance. Sure enough, using an <strong>interleaving structure<\/strong> with a <strong>prequestioning technique <\/strong>helps students learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do, however, have two questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>First<\/strong>: A quiz after two days gives us more useful information than a quiz right away. But &#8220;two days&#8221; isn&#8217;t yet <em>learning<\/em>. In fact, we&#8217;ve got all sorts of reasons to worry that &#8220;short term performance does not accurately predict long-term learning.&#8221; (Check out <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1177\/1745691615569000\">this research review<\/a>.) I will feel MUCH more confident offering this guidance if we have studies confirming these results after noticeably longer periods of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-1024x683.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6665870\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-1024x683.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-768x512.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/AdobeStock_178394384-2048x1365.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>While I&#8217;m at it, I should say: adult learners might benefit from different combinations than K-12 learners. For this reason, I&#8217;d also like to see replications with different age groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To be clear, Pan and his colleagues haven&#8217;t done anything wrong by limiting their study to two days, and working with adults. No one study answers all questions. They&#8217;ve given us a helpful set of data points. I myself think we need <em>several more collections of data points<\/em> before we offer strong advice. They themselves raise this point in their study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Second<\/strong>: The procedure described above uses a version of &#8220;prequestioning&#8221;; but it&#8217;s not exactly &#8220;prequestioning.&#8221; With typical prequestions, students almost certainly don&#8217;t know the answer because they haven&#8217;t yet studied the material. In this case, the students (probably) don&#8217;t know the answer at the beginning of the study. However, over time, they have more and more reason to know the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To my way of thinking, this study STARTS by combining interleaving with <em>prequestioning<\/em>, and ENDS UP combining interleaving with a version of <em>retrieval practice<\/em>. After all: by the final round or two, the students can start recalling the correct answers that they&#8217;ve been studying up to now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here again, I&#8217;m not describing a flaw in the study. At the same time, I do think it&#8217;s helpful to have our terminology as clear as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">To Combine Or Not<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Based on this research, we have a tentative reason to believe that starting with questions that students can&#8217;t yet answer (&#8220;prequestioning&#8221;) and jumbling practice problems together (&#8220;interleaving&#8221;) helps students learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As teachers, we can start trying out this combination of research-supported strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And: we can keep an eager eye out for more research into strategy combinations. A whole new fruitful field awaits&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Pan, S. C., Selvarajan, G., &amp; Murphy, C. S. (2024). Interleaved pretesting enhances category learning and classification skills.&nbsp;<em>Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>13<\/em>(3), 393.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I wrote about an intriguing research question. We know that retrieval practice helps students learn. And we know that generative drawing helps students learn. So: what happens if we combine those two research-informed strategies? As I wrote back then, I think we have three answers to that question: I&#8217;ve just come [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6665870,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6665821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6665821"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6665876,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665821\/revisions\/6665876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6665870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6665821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6665821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6665821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}