How Practice Arrangement And The Completeness Of Worked Examples Effect English Grammar Learning Of Junior High School Students

Interleaved practice is defined to study or practice different learning skills which are presented in an interleaved fashion with items presenting not consecutively within a study session,while in the blocked practice,all items are presented consecutively.Worked examples present learners with a worked-out problem solution and(possibly)explain to study.Interleaved practice plays an important role in education,most of whose studies showed positive effects on learning.However,The prior knowledge of learners may be an impact factor of Interleaved Effects with the less skilled learners may be cognition overloaded due to the frequent shift of learning items.Worked examples learning has been proved to be an effective instructional approach to study grammar rules which involve explicit logical relations.Previous researches of how complete the worked examples improves learning showed inconsistent results,which might also be attributable to the prior knowledge of the learners.In this study,there are two experiments,the first of which is to present worked examples of two English grammar rules to seventh grade students who were divided into high prior knowledge and low prior knowledge,and then they received blocked practice and interleaved practice respectively so as to explore whether the prior knowledge of students is an impact factor of Interleaved Effects.The result shows the interaction between prior knowledge and the type of practice with the degree of forgetting of the two group of students as the dependant variable,which reveals that for the high prior knowledge students,the degree of forgetting is higher when they practiced in a blocked way than in an interleaved way;and for the low prior knowledge students,the degree of forgetting is higher when they were under an interleaved practice.The second experiment explores whether the prior knowledge of students is an impact factor of interleaved effects with consideration of the degree of the worked examples which are divided into complete worked examples,incomplete worked example with feedback and incomplete worked examples without feedback.The results show that students performed better in the complete worked examples than incomplete worked example with and without feedback.And despite the degree of completeness of the worked examples,for the high prior knowledge students,the degree of forgetting is higher when they practiced in a blocked way than in an interleaved way while for the low prior knowledge students,the degree of forgetting is higher when they were under an interleaved practice.The following conclusions can be drawn through the above two experiments:(1)The interleaved practice effect is restricted by the prior knowledge of learners.High prior knowledge learners benefit more in interleaved practice since it produces a higher retention compared with blocked practice while low prior knowledge learners benefit more in blocked practice since it makes them remember what they have learned longer.(2)The complete worked examples enhance learners’ performance in comparison of incomplete worked examples in that they can reduce the cognitive resource and learning time of learners.(3)Giving the feedback makes no difference on the performance of learning the incomplete worked examples.