It Don’t Come Easy

This blog is a prelude to a new book by Carl Hendrick, Jim Heal, Piet van der Ploeg and me about instructional paradoxes.
It’s our nature to try to make things easier for others. As good people we try to lighten our neighbour’s load. As parents, we want to make things easier for our children than they were for us. And as teachers, we’re taught to extend this, by making learning as easy as possible. We think that it’s our job to make learning as easy and effortless as possible.

The problem is that true learning only happens when we expend mental effort during learning. Learning requires deep processing of what we are to learn. And this deep processing requires mental effort. And the job of the good teacher is to coax, force, and/or stimulate their students to expend the necessary mental effort while learning. As Robert and Elizabeth Bjork say: ‘Making it difficult but in a good way’.
In a good way? Not all extra mental effort leads to increased and deeper learning. Making a task too hard to solve because the learner lacks the prerequisite knowledge to solve it, designing learning to achieve failure (productive failure), and choosing an instructional approach like discovery learning or enquiry learning all require the learner to expend quite a lot of mental effort, but none of these lead to better learning. What does?
Desirable Difficulties
Desirable difficulties are learning conditions that are often experienced by the learner as requiring more effort, but that have a positive effect on learning and the transfer of knowledge and skills. In the words of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, “[c]onditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer”[1]. This critical distinction between performance and learning lies at the root of the idea of desirable difficulties (see my earlier blog about this).
The Bjorks assume that an item in memory can be characterised by two strengths – storage strength and retrieval strength. They assumed that “current performance is entirely a function of current retrieval strength, but that storage strength acts to retard the loss (forgetting) and enhance the gain (relearning) of retrieval strength”. The key idea is that the conditions that most rapidly increase retrieval strength differ from those that maximise the gain of storage strength. If learners interpret current retrieval strength (performance on a test) as storage strength (learning), they’re fooling themselves.
The Bjorks went on a mission to figure out what these ‘better conditions’ are; conditions that seem to initially create difficulty but lead to more durable (i.e., improved ‘storage strength’; remembering long-term) and flexible learning (i.e., improved ‘retrieval strength’; being able to apply something at a later moment and/or in different contexts). These conditions are… desirable difficulties and they describe five.

Interleaving/Variable practice: In interleaving, you vary the conditions of practice. You mix (i.e., or interleave) practice on several related skills together. In other words you don’t block practice, repeating the same type of task over and over again but rather shuffle tasks around.
Contextual interference: Contextual interference (doing the same thing often but in different situations or contexts) is very similar to interleaving but here you make the task environment – not the task itself – more variable or unpredictable in a way that creates a temporary interference for the learner.
Spaced practice: This is also known as ‘distributed practice’ and is about spacing learning over time. Instead of studying for an hour and a half, you split your study into three sessions of thirty minutes with one or more days in between.
Reduced feedback: Reducing feedback frequency and specificity stimulates their independence, knowing that the instructor won’t give them the answer in the end.
Retrieval practice/Practice testing: In a nutshell, practice testing ‘forces’ learners to try to recall what they’ve previously learned from memory, usually as opposed to rereading. Because they actively remember that information – retrieve it from their memory – they can remember it better and longer.
How to deal with this
From the perspective of the teacher we must help students understand the difference between making learning harder and making learning harder in a good way. To do this, teachers need to understand that just making learning harder through techniques such as productive failure, discovery learning, or giving students learning tasks that are beyond their grasp or ability (e.g., we learn more from failure than success) is not desirable and why.
From the perspective of teacher evaluation, headmasters/principals, schools, inspectorates and the like must stop evaluating teachers and their teaching in terms of student performance on exams, student satisfaction, and/or self-reported judgements of learning during the lessons or at the end of the semester. Cumulative testing might be a beginning.
From the perspective of the learner, we need to learners to make the right choice between expending minimal effort to achieve short-term gratification (i.e., getting a passing grade on an exam) and cognitively struggling a bit to achieve long-term learning. The learner is a discipulus economicus (my neologism). They’re naturally going to go for the former; maximum results with minimal effort. First, the learner needs to be explicitly taught what desirable difficulties are and to acquire the skills necessary to implement them. Second, they need to experience that these techniques work! They need, in non-threatening testing situation low-stakes formative assessment or no stakes (retrieval practice) testing, to experience that without investing more time (the only extra investment is in mental effort) they can get just as good grades, often without the need for cramming the night before. However, don’t expect them to take your word for it!
In other words, teachers must prove to (not just tell) students that having things go a little slower and be a little harder are not bad things; that is, that the saying ‘No pain, no gain’ is true for learning.
[1] Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society, 2, 59-68.