Desirable Difficulties

Dear Friends,

This week’s evidence comes from a new (April 24, 2024) study by Professor Onan Erdem and colleagues on the subject of “desirable difficulties.”  

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00245-7

The authors found, not surprisingly, that students do not always seek out the path of challenge, what the Greeks called the Scholar’s Bench on the hill, but rather the value of indolence. I’m often the same way, so I can’t get very judgmental about students who prefer pleasure over pain. While students know that “desirable difficulty” is the optimal way to study – see Pooja Argawal’s wonderful book “Powerful Teaching,” the vast majority of students resort to their comfort zone – re-reading, highlighting, and more re-reading, when the evidence says that desirable difficulty comes from self-quizzing and dealing with the challenges of not having the correct answers immediately at hand.  

 The question for teachers is how do we get students to take the path of resistance rather than ease? The authors recommend the “Study Smart” framework to encourage students to, before study begins, consider Knowledge, Beliefs, Commitment, and Planning. There is an apt analogy in electronic games, in which each successive round has slightly greater difficulty than the previous game. The difficulty is not so great that students give up, and not so easy that students become bored. 

One of the greatest enemies of choosing desirable difficulty is, as Nancy Frey noted in our book on student engagement, that teachers signal verbally and non-verbally only approval for the right answer. Students conclude that it is better to remain silent than to venture a wrong answer. For a fully engaged classroom, Frey conclude, it must be a safe place to make mistakes. That is the central argument of Fearless Classrooms, my latest book. I have never felt more passionate about a book because I see too many classrooms in which fear is pervasive. We will, as Erdnan and colleagues contend, only have students seek the optimal point of desirable difficulty if they feel psychological safety in doing so.

I can be reached at 781.710.9633 or douglas.reeves@creativeleadership.net, if you want to discuss this week’s research.

Best,

Doug

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