The Role of Mental Effort in Students’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Interleaved and Blocked Study Strategies and Their Willingness to Use Them

Students tend to avoid effective but effortful study strategies. One potential explanation could be that high-effort experiences may not give students an immediate feeling of learning, which may affect their perceptions of the strategy’s effectiveness and their willingness to use it. In two experiments, we investigated the role of mental effort in students’ considerations about a typically effortful and effective strategy (interleaved study) versus a typically less effortful and less effective strategy (blocked study), and investigated the effect of individual feedback about students’ study experiences and learning outcomes on their considerations. Participants learned painting styles using both blocked and interleaved studying (within-subjects, Experiment 1, N = 150) or either blocked or interleaved studying (between-subjects, Experiment 2, N = 299), and reported their study experiences and considerations before, during, and after studying. Both experiments confirmed prior research that students reported higher effort investment and made lower judgments of learning during interleaved than during blocked studying. Furthermore, effort was negatively related to students’ judgments of learning and (via these judgments) to the perceived effectiveness of the strategy and their willingness to use it. Interestingly, these relations were stronger in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, suggesting that effort might become a more influential cue when students can directly compare experiences with two strategies. Feedback positively affected students’ considerations about interleaved studying, yet not to the extent that they considered it more effective and desirable than blocked studying. Our results provide evidence that students use effort as a cue for their study strategy decisions.