apfelbaum, hazeltine and mcmurray (2013) found consistent benefits of varied practice for children learning phonics regularities in english. children who practiced the vowel rules of english in varied consonant contexts showed substantially stronger learning of the vowel rules than children who practiced in constrained contexts. these benefits of varied practice included generalization to new tasks and new items. this finding contrasts with the common phonics practice of emphasizing "word families," in which students practice phonics rules in sets of highly similar items (e.g. cat, hat, pat, bat).