NURS 8544 Week 4 Theory Application Paper Example

Why Mixed Practice Should Feel Worse and Work Better: Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Interleaved Dosage Calculation Practice

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8544: Strategies for Teaching Innovations in Nursing Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Why Mixed Practice Should Feel Worse and Work Better: Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Interleaved Dosage Calculation Practice

The Method and the Question

The method examined here is interleaved practice in dosage calculation for first-year learners at a composite community college nursing program. In the current course, practice is blocked: learners complete a set of tablet calculations, then a set of liquid calculations, then a set of intravenous rate calculations, each set containing only one kind of problem. Under the proposed method, the same problems are shuffled so that each practice set mixes all kinds. The question is not which theory interleaving resembles but which theory predicts that it will improve learning and explains how. A theory that only describes a method after the fact cannot guide a teacher who must decide whether to persist when a session goes badly.

Choosing a Theory

Four theories were considered. Behaviorist accounts would predict that blocked practice is better, because repeated correct responses to one problem type strengthen that response most quickly. Constructivist accounts would favor authentic, ill-structured problems over drill of either kind and say little about the order of practice items. Theories of desirable difficulty predict that interleaving helps, but they describe the effect more than the mechanism (Bjork & Bjork, 2011). Cognitive load theory was chosen because it predicts both the benefit and the cost of interleaving and specifies the mechanism in terms of working memory, which allows a teacher to see which part of a session is doing the work.

Cognitive load theory holds that working memory is severely limited, that learning consists of building schemas in long-term memory and that instruction should manage the load it places on working memory accordingly (Sweller et al., 1998).

Three Kinds of Load, Mapped to the Session

Intrinsic load comes from the material itself: the number of elements a learner must hold in mind at once. A dosage problem requires the learner to identify the ordered dose, the available concentration, the units involved and the calculation needed. Intrinsic load is the same whether practice is blocked or interleaved, because the problems are the same.

Extraneous load comes from the way material is presented, when it consumes working memory without contributing to learning. A poorly laid-out worksheet that makes learners search for the ordered dose adds extraneous load. Blocking and interleaving do not differ much here either, provided the worksheets are well designed.

Germane load refers to the working memory devoted to building schemas, in this case the schema that links a problem's features to the right calculation. Here the methods differ sharply. In blocked practice, every problem in a set calls for the same calculation, so the learner never has to decide which one to use; the heading of the set has already decided. The learner practices executing a calculation but not choosing it. In interleaved practice, each problem requires the learner to look at its features and select the calculation. That selection is exactly the step learners fail at on exams and in clinical settings, where problems do not arrive labeled. Interleaving therefore raises germane load by requiring the work of discrimination that blocked practice removes.

Studies of mathematics practice support this mechanism. Rohrer and Taylor (2007) found that learners who practiced shuffled problems performed worse during practice but substantially better on a delayed test than those who practiced blocked problems, and their analysis attributed the advantage to learning which procedure each problem required.

The Risk the Theory Predicts

Interleaving makes practice harder, and performance during practice falls. Learners get more problems wrong, take longer and report more frustration. An instructor watching an interleaved session will see a class that looks worse than a blocked class. The theory predicts exactly this: the extra germane load is the work of learning, and it shows up as difficulty during practice. Soderstrom and Bjork (2015) reviewed evidence that performance during learning is a poor guide to long-term learning and that conditions which depress immediate performance often improve retention and transfer.

This prediction matters for a teacher. Without it, an instructor who sees worse practice scores would conclude the method has failed and return to blocking. With it, the instructor can recognize the dip as expected. But the theory also sets a limit. If intrinsic load is already high, as it is for learners who have not yet mastered the individual calculations, adding the germane load of discrimination may overload working memory and prevent learning altogether. Interleaving should therefore begin only after learners can perform each calculation correctly in isolation. The method is a second stage of practice, not a replacement for the first.

How the Prediction Could Be Wrong

Cognitive load theory makes a testable prediction here: on a delayed test with mixed problems, interleaved learners should outperform blocked learners, especially on selecting the right calculation, even though their practice scores were lower. If interleaved learners do worse on the delayed test as well as during practice, the theory's account of this method would be wrong for this population, perhaps because intrinsic load was higher than assumed. If they do better only on immediate tests, the advantage would not reflect durable schema building. The course already gives a mixed calculation test three weeks after practice ends, which would allow the prediction to be checked without new instruments.

Applying the theory has also changed the method. The original plan was to interleave from the first practice session. The theory's warning about intrinsic load moved interleaving to the second week, after a short period of blocked practice, which is a design decision a resemblance-based reading of the theory would not have produced. The theory also changed what the instructor will say to learners. Because interleaved practice feels harder, learners may conclude they are doing badly and lose confidence. Before the first mixed set, the instructor will tell them that more errors during practice are expected and that the test three weeks later is the measure that matters. Without that explanation, the method's predicted dip could be read by learners, as well as by faculty, as failure.

References

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56-64). Worth Publishers.

Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481-498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-007-9015-8

Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176-199. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615569000

Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. G. W. C. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251-296. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022193728205