It feels a bit odd to say this as an academic, but I am largely very glad to not be a student anymore. I do not miss sitting in crowded lecture halls, or taking exams, or studying for long hours into the night before said exams. I especially don’t miss feeling like I wasted so much effort cramming before my exams (until the last possible minute, naturally), only to receive scores that were, to put it delicately, less than satisfactory.

With hindsight (and more exposure to the research on memory and learning), I’ve come to see how many of my negative experiences in school were mostly due to my own mistakes*. For one thing, I had terrible studying habits. On top of my regular strategy of last-minute cramming (already one of the least effective strategies for long-term learning), I also tended to study topics one at a time, reviewing all details on a single topic before moving on to a different one. Had I known about one of the most consistent findings in memory research—that interleaving, or regularly switching between multiple topics, leads to longer-lasting and more accurate memory—I might have been a much better student.

In their recent paper for Memory & Cognition, Jeri L. Little, Josephine C.M. Fealy, Koki Kobayashi, and Sarah Roth (pictured below) launched a deeper investigation into the mechanisms underlying the advantages of interleaved studying in comparison to blocked studying. Interleaving topics may highlight key differences between them, thereby making these differences easier to notice, which then allows for easier abstraction and knowledge development. However, in their paper, “How note‑taking and note‑using affect the benefit of interleaving over blocking”, the authors bring up an alternative explanation: blocked studying may only appear to be less effective than interleaved studying, simply because participants in psychology experiments can quickly recognize when they are seeing multiple examples of the same category. In noticing this, they may opt to spend less time identifying the key features of the category (since there’s less of a need to differentiate between categories when they only see one category at a time) and instead focus on the details of each individual example. In other words, blocked studying might just lead people to focus on remembering different details than interleaved studying, which subsequently gives them less time to identify the key features that are readily highlighted in interleaved studying. Importantly, these differences don’t necessarily imply that blocked studying is overall worse for learning—it just biases people to focus on different details.

One way to investigate the mechanistic differences between these two studying strategies is to add an element, such as note-taking, that could make up for the potential differences in attention allocation. If the supposed advantages of interleaved studying are actually due to a bias in attention allocation in blocked studying, then being able to take notes while engaging in blocked studying accommodate these attentional biases and allow people to not just notice but also remember the key details that define each category. On the other hand, if the benefits of interleaved studying are entirely due to this its ability to encourage abstraction of key features into richer knowledge, then note-taking during blocked study likely wouldn’t do much to make it a more effective strategy.

In the experiments described in this paper, the authors showed participants different paintings of landscapes from 12 artists, all of whom had a unique style. The participants saw each painting, labeled with its artist, in either a blocked sequence, where they saw multiple paintings from the same artist in a single sequence, or an interleaved one, where paintings from different artists were presented one after another. Half of the participants were allowed to take notes during this portion of the experiment, and the other half were not.

Once they finished this study phase, the participants were then tested on how well they learned the styles of each artist. In the testing phase, they were shown new paintings one at a time and had to select each painting’s creator from the full list of 12 artists. Participants who had been allowed to take notes while studying were allowed to use these notes during the test phase. The second experiment followed the same procedure but added more time for studying each painting (since note-takers might need more time to write down their observations), while also adding a condition that allowed participants to take notes during the study phase but then barred the use of notes during the test phase (more on this in a bit).

In both experiments, the participants who were not allowed to take any notes experienced the typical advantage of interleaved studying over blocked studying, where they made more correct matches between paintings and artists if they had studied these art styles in an interleaved sequence. However, in both experiments, this advantage to interleaved studying was eliminated when the participants were allowed to take notes during the study phase and use them during the test phase. This suggests that something as simple as taking notes can make blocked studying just as effective as interleaved studying by using a form of supplemental memory to make up for the attentional bias introduced by the blocked presentation.

Interestingly, when note-takers had their notes removed before the test phase, there was no reliable advantage for either study strategy. This particular finding gives us a more nuanced understanding of how exactly note-taking helps to close the gap between blocked and interleaved studying: taking notes allows people to use an external form of memory “storage”, which then needs to still be externally available when the information needs to be accessed later.

The full paper has additional analyses on the contents of the participants’ notes and how these contents potentially predicted their later memory performance, as well as other examinations on whether people’s explicit judgments of each learning strategy were actually reflected in their performance. Overall, while it’s been clear for a long time that the study strategies that we opt to engage in can have vastly different outcomes for learning, the dynamics of how different strategies affect learning are still being uncovered, and the addition of other simple strategies, like note-taking, can further influence these outcomes. But even if I’d known this as a student, I’m not sure if any of my grades would actually improve; I was also pretty bad at taking notes.

* I will maintain that at least half of the grudges I still hold against some of my former professors are perfectly justified and not at all petty.

Featured Psychonomic Society article

Little, J.L., Fealy, J.C.M., Kobayashi, K. et al. How note-taking and note-using affects the benefit of interleaving over blocking. Mem Cogn (2025). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-01751-8