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Reframing Effort to Improve Learners’ Study Strategy Choices
by Connie M. Fralick
Faculty Advisor: Veronica Yan, PhD
Even though the study strategy of mixing study topics (“interleaving”) is better for learning than studying one topic at a time (“blocking”), people consistently underestimate the former and favor the latter. A barrier to interleaving is that it feels more difficult than blocking. People gauge the efficacy of study strategies by how easy they feel, inaccurately viewing lower levels of mental effort as a signal of good learning. However, reframing the study situation as something that the student chooses to invest in versus something that is required of them has been found to counter the view that easier learning is better learning. In the current study, I compared the effects of using this voluntary-versus-required framing on participants’ decisions to interleave or block during studying. In the effort-as-voluntary condition, the more effortful that participants thought interleaving was compared to blocking, the more effective they perceived interleaving to be and more likely they were to choose to interleave in the future. This pattern was the opposite of that found in the effort-as-required condition. However, reframing effort did not significantly change the study strategy decisions made.