We often have to ‘struggle’ to learn. By definition, learning means a change in our long-term memory (something new has been added), but learning is often an uncertain, uneven process. It’s also hard because it usually requires a significant investment of effort, over time – that’s certainly the case with ‘biologically secondary’ learning – the stuff that happens in school.
Not only is learning hard, it’s also invisible – we can’t see it, we have to infer it from performance. Alas, performance in the moment – current performance – is an unreliable indicator of whether new ‘learning’ will stick in the long term. Just when does ‘information’ become ‘knowledge’ and thereby qualify as ‘learning’? That’s a good question!
We DO ‘learn’ of course – we learn all the time – but as teachers we can never be certain when we set students off on an activity what the learning outcome will be for each one of them. It’s obvious that students don’t always learn what we teach; otherwise – as Dylan William says – teachers could simply use their programmes of learning/schemes of work as evidence of what they have learned. This constant uncertainty is, of course, one reason teachers use assessment: to elicit information about what has been learned and to measure progress.
‘Struggle’ IS important for learning, but – and it’s a big BUT – not too much. Not too much because almost everyone will only persist with something difficult if they believe that success is possible. People who never or rarely experience success in their learning are almost bound to give up at a certain point, aren’t they? I am VERY unlikely to invest in learning, say, Chinese, if at the point of preparing to embark I am told that I have one day in which to achieve fluency. We have to believe we can get there to be willing to invest in the attempt; I’m just not getting to fluency in Chinese in a day. So, no thanks.
Teachers understand well the need to support students so that they learn well; that’s why they provide worked examples and models and writing frames and other forms of scaffolding. But keeping in mind the importance of ‘struggle’ brings me to my key point, of ‘desirable difficulties’ versus undesirable difficulties.
The term ‘desirable difficulties’ was coined by Robert and Elizabeth Björk. Their main message was that by deliberately introducing certain kinds of difficulty during instruction, learning could be improved. They recommended:
– retrieval practice: asking questions about previously-covered material, as opposed to, for example, just rereading that material
– spacing out the study of material to allow students to forget a bit before returning to it
– interleaving: studying different topics at the same time, to prevent learners from developing ‘the illusion of knowing’
– varying the conditions in which instruction takes place
– and reducing and delaying feedback in order to reduce learners’ reliance on the teacher/expert
The first three of these are now probably fairly well-embedded in schools; the last two far less so and I am personally a bit less convinced by them. The vast majority of us accept that struggle is worthwhile because we can feel that it provides the basis for improvement. But let’s face it, struggling isn’t much fun at the time, so it’s important that we manage it right. Generally, struggle is only desirable after success has been ‘encoded’. By this I mean that students are far more likely to persist in the ‘struggle’ to learn if they can see what success looks like and if they can experience regular success while they are trying to learn.
We need to be careful then to only introduce the struggle – the ‘desirable difficulties’ – after students have experienced a measure of success. In practical terms, as an example, students shouldn’t be embarking on independent practice unless they have a good chance at that point of practising successfully.
Not all difficulties are desirable. Giving Year 7 students degree-level Physics questions to do is not likely to help them learn Physics, because they won’t have the background knowledge required to handle the work; they are very likely to flounder. And singing loudly to students or playing the radio loudly while they work will not help their learning either – in other words, difficulties that just make it hard to learn well are not desirable – only certain kinds of difficulty, such as those described above, are desirable.
I leave the final word to Robert and Elizabeth Björk (examples in brackets are mine):
‘Conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly (e.g. use of many supportive cues during an activity) often fail to support long-term retention, whereas conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning (e.g. interleaving the study of different topics) often optimise long-term retention and transfer’. Psychology and the real world: essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society – pages 56-64.
