Nate Kornell and Bjork showed this when they experimentally taughtstudents different art styles. First, they used the traditional approachof showing students one art style at a time using different paintings.Then, they deliberately mixed up the styles and shuffled thepaintings around.

Whichever tools are selected, criticalreading skills, like other cognitive skills, benefit from spaced andinterleaved practice (Brown et al., 2014).

Interleaving is a learning technique that involves mixing together different topics or forms of practice, in order to facilitate learning. For example, if a student uses interleaving while preparing for an exam, they can mix up different types of questions, rather than study only one type of question at a time.Interleaving, which is sometimes referred to as mixed practice or varied practice, is contrasted with blocked practice (sometimes referred to as specific practice), which involves focusing on only a single topic or form of practice at a time.

Well, for one, there was a clear preference for the blocked study schedule, with 68% of participants reporting that they would choose the blocked strategy to study for a test, while only 32% chose the interleaved strategy. Which is interesting, because the research on blocked vs. interleaved practice suggests that in many cases, interleaving is actually the more effective strategy (here’s a great summary of the research on interleaved practice, why and how it works, guidelines for use, and examples of times when blocked may be better).