School is back in session, meaning a moment to take a closer look at your didactic strategy. Many schools and publishers are already using Drillster to get their content to students, therefore we would like to tell you about a useful Drillster functionality that not everyone is familiar with yet: interleaving.  

When publishers include their content in drills, we see it often goes as follows: one drill is linked to each paragraph in the learning content. If you have about five drills per chapter, it gives students the opportunity to learn the material at their own pace.
Logically, during exam time, several chapters belong to the subject matter. Let’s say that a test is about three chapters, or roughly 15 drills… Quite a lot, to ‘nail down’. Fortunately, this can be done more efficiently with interleaving.

Combine drills

Interleaving is the alternation of different chapters or lesson parts. By combining multiple subjects, the brain has to switch between similar topics like grammar and spelling or conjugating past tense and present tense, for example. That extra effort that the brain has to make to retrieve the right information from memory each time ensures a stronger and longer-lasting learning effect!

Drillster offers you the possibility to combine various learning elements in a so-called practice set. One drill is then automatically created from the drills selected by the student, teacher or publisher. For example, you could select 5 drills of one chapter or even 15 drills that were created for the test.

Just as adaptive

And wait, there’s more! Drillster is an adaptive app, which crafts the contents per drill to the individual. This knowledge from previously practiced drills simply takes the app to the ‘new’ combined drill. The proficiency level of the practice set shows a weighted average of all combined drills. Because the information from previous learning moments is taken into account, the students mainly practice what they find difficult, or that which has been poorly mastered. What they already know well comes back less often. In this way, you arrive at the most efficient way to learn, and with just one click of a button!

Want to know more about the learning methodology behind Drillster? Click here and read about the Drillster way of learning.

The optimal learning effect

Do you want to use interleaving in the most effective way possible? Keep it to subjects that are related to each other such as grammar and vocabulary in language arts or scientific and standard notation in mathematics. As soon as you start combining Social Studies and English, or Mathematics with Philosophy, you’ve gone too far. The brain has to switch so often that it becomes over exhausted and can’t absorb new information effectively. So remember to keep the practice sets within the same subject for the most optimal learning outcome.

Don’t (yet) know how to combine multiple drills? Or do you want to know more about interleaving in drills? Give us a call, we will be happy to explain it to you!