Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In practice, mathematics education is blocked (i.e., teachingone topic at a time; CCSS, 2010), but research generallypromotes interleaving (i.e., teaching multiple topics together;Rohrer & Taylor, 2007). For example, fraction arithmetic isblocked with students being taught fraction addition beforefraction multiplication. Since students often confuse fractionoperations to produce arithmetic errors, interleaved fractionarithmetic instruction might be more productive than blockedinstruction to teach students to discriminate between theoperations. Additionally, a cognitive task analysis suggeststhat fraction multiplication may be a prerequisite to fractionaddition and thus reversing the blocking order may enhancelearning. Two experiments with fraction addition and fractionmultiplication were run. Experiments 1 and 2 show thatinterleaved instruction is generally better than the currentblocked instruction. Experiment 2 provides evidence thatblocking that reverses the standard order -- providing practiceon fraction multiplication before fraction addition -- producesbetter learning.