Insight

Stop Practicing What You Already Know

James·Saturday, October 31, 2026 Edition

THE FAMILIAR FEELING OF NOTHING

Open the textbook to chapter seven. Work through all twelve problems of type A until the steps feel automatic. Close that section. Move to chapter eight. Work through all ten problems of type B the same way. Note, at the end of two hours, how much better you are at both. Feel the satisfaction of that. File it away as evidence that you know how to study. This is the procedure. It is also why the exam will go badly.

Blocked practice feels like learning because retrieval is easy — and retrieval is easy because nothing has actually been stored deeply enough to require effort. When every problem in a set is the same type, your brain doesn't choose a strategy; it just continues the last one. No selection is required, so none is learned. Real transfer — the ability to use knowledge outside the room you learned it in. Requires your brain to first identify what kind of problem it is facing. Blocked practice skips that step entirely. You are measuring fluency, not learning, and fluency evaporates the moment the context shifts.

Blocked practice feels like learning because retrieval is easy — and retrieval is easy because nothing has actually been stored deeply enough to require effort.

Robert Bjork's research on desirable difficulties, developed across decades at UCLA, documented this pattern clearly. In one representative set of studies, students who interleaved different problem types during practice scored lower on immediate tests than students who blocked. And significantly higher on delayed tests and novel transfer tasks. The blocked group felt more confident leaving the session. The interleaved group had actually learned. The gap between those two outcomes is the entire problem.

THE HOUR BEFORE THE EXAM

Picture yourself in the final hour before a certification exam you have spent six weeks preparing for. The urge is to review the material you feel shakiest on, running through it until it feels solid. That feeling of solidity is the trap. Instead, pull ten random questions from across all five topic areas and work through them in whatever order they come, without grouping. Your performance will feel messier. You will second-guess more, backtrack more, get some wrong that you were getting right last week. That friction is not a sign you have forgotten something. It is the sign that your brain is doing the harder work. The work the exam will actually require.

You did not fail those six weeks of studying because you lacked discipline. The design of the practice was measuring the wrong thing. Change the order and the difficulty returns, which means the learning does too.

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Try This

Set a timer for twenty minutes and pull five problems of one type, five of a second type, and five of a third — then shuffle them and work through the stack in that mixed order without sorting first. Notice which problems feel hardest to start: those are the ones where identification, not execution, is the skill you still need to build.

How?

Key Facts

*The feeling of fluency during a practice session is a measure of short-term retrieval, not durable learning — smooth performance today predicts poor transfer tomorrow.

*Interleaving problems of different types within a single session forces your brain to identify which approach fits which situation, which is the actual skill being tested in real life.

*Before your next study or preparation session, break the material into at least three distinct problem types and alternate between them rather than finishing one kind before moving to the next.