I keep finding most of those papers obvious on their face and quite simple to derive from first principles and some observation. What happened to teaching that so many patently obvious concepts have to be "rediscovered" so often?
It wasn't so obvious to plenty of smart and competent teachers and textbook writers, so if nothing else it's worth "rediscovering" to bring it to their attention. Not everyone has the time or energy to derive their everyday decisions from first principles.
Let's say I'm teaching 50 min periods. 15 mins for questions. Half hour to introduce new material, with a couple of examples. Five mins left. Interleave now?
Everyone has sat through 12 or 16 years of school. That can lead them to think they know all about it. I've been teaching since 79 and I'm still learning a lot,all the time. It ain't obvious.
I've only been actively teaching (at home, no less) for a couple of years, but I can definitely identify with this. I make index cards with each kind of question we encounter in the curriculum, then I draw some random cards from the deck in order to pick questions going all the way back to the start. We do a quiz every week for every subject that's made up of those questions.
It always comes down to time though, it seems like you can use all these ideas and teach for mastery, but it costs about 30% in terms of forward motion through the material. I'm lucky in that that I can just decide to pay that price, but it would be a real stretch to put all this into practice in a place where you have a coverage deadline that's already hard to hit.
Now we have some evidence that it is probably true; we still need a bunch more studies to make sure this is reproducible and robust for a variety of circumstances. Yay science !
