Desirable Difficulties - How Learning Works
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- Опубліковано 19 чер 2024
- What are desirable difficulties and how can we leverage them to improve our learning?
What kinds of difficulties are desirable and what kinds are not desirable?
This video covers a lot of ground on desirable difficulties, so that you don’t get tripped up next time your friend makes you run through an obstacle course while testing you on your French.
For more on effective practice, check out: • Practice More Efficien...
00:00 Intro
00:48 Distinction between training and performance
03:14 Desirable difficulties and mistakes
03:48 Spacing
04:45 Interleaving
06:07 Contextual variation
07:08 Difficulties that AREN'T desirable
08:03 Distinguishing desirable from UNdesirable difficulties
10:30 Baseball donut example
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Short article on desirable difficulties: teaching.yale-nus.edu.sg/wp-c...
Research on bat weights, first page does a pretty good job of summarizing the research: www.koreascience.or.kr/articl....
Image of the baseball weight from Driveline Baseball: www.drivelinebaseball.com/201...
If you’re looking for more, a Google scholar search (scholar.google.com) for “desirable difficulties” will yield a lot of good stuff. Especially look for articles written by Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork.
And a legend was born 💯💯💯
Yep totally
0:56 distinction between training and performance (its the performance that counts)
3:17 desirable difficulties means increasing the mistakes made during the training phase to improve performance
3:41 three kinds of desirable difficulties: spacing, interweaving, contextual variation
8:11 some difficulties are not desirable
you are truly a hidden gem. I can't thank you enough for your videos.
In software we have a similar concept called readability. Learning how code you need to modify works (your own from months ago or just someone elses) requires studying and reading it. It's a extra layer of difficulty on top of solving the problem you actually want solve. In other words, it's a measure of undesirable difficulty, and most programmers are very, very bad at it 😅
Hi Benjamin, great videos! I do apply a desirable difficulty in my neuroanatomy classes - instead of learning only how to identify the brain structures, I teach my psychology students how to draw different parts/views of the brain and on the exam they are supposed to draw everything and identify in the drawings all structures/functions by heart (in the blackboard as an oral exam). I’ve noticed that by doing that they end up building a more efficient mental representation about how the brain is and what they learn lasts for way longer (many years in fact). Also, since they know exactly the final “performance” they are supposed to do by the end of the course (the oral exam), they do a lot of practice by retrieving all information they learn pretty much every class.
Awesome! Sounds like a great approach.
Yeah, in general I think basic labeling activities (e.g., look at a map, label the countries; look at a brain, label the parts) are not great at generating the kind of thinking that we want students to do. Your alternative is much better.
Dr. Keep,
The first two examples you used as undesirable difficulties are actually desirable in helping students learn. They did a study the front thing in a study that is cited in Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. Anything that makes a student have to focus more or pay more attention or try harder is going to usually be a desirable difficulty. You did correctly point out interleaving, context variation, and spacing as desirable difficulties
Please keep making these! I have found these very helpful
Intresting and helpful with teaching students and martial arts and in my own training. Great video Ben.
Thanks Chris!
really appreciate your content
your lit!!! i will watch all of your vids and support youuu!!! pls make more vids if u have free time. this is not a request. just wanna let u know that your so greatt!!!
I answer Reddit questions: ua-cam.com/video/P9RRLT8ns5s/v-deo.html
More on effective practice: ua-cam.com/video/aIPS4ugcanM/v-deo.html
Thanks
You are literally the Eric Helms of learning. Now all we need is a Mike Israetel of learning and some AI enhanced custom learning templates 😂
oh ffs leave the AI out of this
@@user-ck8kp8vb4l It's a reference to Juggernaut Training AI and the RP App.
ive only ever been able to learn by interaction with others and observing. I've never had the ability to create an envirorment for independant learning. i got through school (at a general studies level) just by lots of summer school and taking home economics, nice techers who liked or felt bad and of course, using others. now that i have an appreciatuon & respect for education, i can no longer function mentally in order to teach myself how to teach myself how to learn to learn and then finally , learn something.
Sorry to hear that. It's hard to diagnose learning challenges in the abstract, but here are some things to think about: can you focus enough to read? What about skills that aren't typical "academic" skills - we learn a lot of things throughout our lives (e.g., how to cook a new food, how to fix a bike or a leaky faucet, etc.)? You watched this video: try taking a blank sheet of paper out and write down what you remember about it.
This video isn't exactly a guide on self-learning. But reading your comments got me thinking of making a general video about learning on one's own. I'll work on it. : )
I play the Cello, and I think this can be used for other instruments too, I use similar concepts to practice, for example, play pp and ff for the whole piece and you’ll have a better grasp of how dynamics feels, if you want to play a fast piece, increase your speed to that exceeds your target speed, and when you come back to target speed you’ll feel comfortable
I've been interested in this speeding up/slowing down approach lately, too. Going to look more into the research on it, but have good personal experiences with it.
I must say once my poor eyesight and dim lighting had unexpected effect (it was a difficulty comparable to the hard-to-read font).
I was playing in an orchestra and because I had to move my head really close to the score to see what's in there, soon I memorized it (at least at the end of the session i remembered it, can't remember if it persisted).
it probably doesn't count as desirable difficulty cuz I wasn't really trying to learn it / I wouldn't have needed to learn it if i had glsses
it was kind of like the generational stuff from another video in a sense
had to constantly remember what was there
Hi Benjamin! Could you make a video how properly study words in foreign language? I struggle with consistent forgetting new studied words..
Okay, so how does interleaving and this material as a whole correspond to your other video about cognitive load theory (where interleaving would seem to directly oppose the idea of decreasing extraneous cognitive load)?
EDiT: also actually difficult to read fonts have been found to increase learning outcomes (likely due to slower pace of reading and need to pay more attention to actually read - rather than glance).
Hi great video, one question though regarding desirable difficulty. You brought up making test harder to read, and I seem to remember some studies which suggest that smaller text improves understanding, with the gist of the explanation being: The smaller text made it harder to read and that improved the understanding. I know of similar effects in for example journaling in psychotherapy where writting things out by hand created better theraputic responses; The idea here being the longhand slows things down, so that the actual reflection improves. Now, in regards to the studies on smaller text my memory might deceive me, however I still wonder whether there is the possibility of "side-effects" of difficulty, where some superficially not desirable difficulties modulate the learning experience in a positive way. Any thoughts on that?
You may be interested in reading this study - link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-012-0255-8 - which gives a summary of some results like the one you cite. The phenomenon you're describing (e.g., smaller, harder-to-read fonts) is part of a class of manipulations that lead to "disfluency" when reading. Disfluency can be a desirable difficulty, but also, in some cases, isn't. Fluency does tend to affect judgments of learning, however.
There's a lot of room for further research on which difficulties are desirable and which aren't. And it can be tricky to know which is which. I was probably a little too flip in using, as an example, disfluent text as being obviously bad.
I remember I was wondering if I should write notes in other language I am fluent in to ensure I understand it, I ended up not doing it since it feels like too much of a hustle and ended up just rephrasing, now I'm curious if it would be desirable or not in your opinion
Should music students practice scales and rhythm separately or simultaneously?
I think what you consider to be a “desirable “difficulty could be broaden considerably.
From the research that I recall, it seems that even difficulties, such as burning, the lights down for having audible distortion in a sound increased ability to learn.
I can’t remember the book or study that I learned this from, but I am almost certain it was a reliable source since would never read a book from someone that wasn’t.
> I am almost certain it was a reliable source since would never read a book from someone that wasn’t.
Can you really tell in advance?
@@TimothyJesionowski You can be very careful of what you read, yes. But obviously you can’t know for sure.
Like your food. Can you really know in advance that a food won’t kill you? No.
This isn’t an argument against safe food.
For the donut bat example…I’m confused. Wouldn’t changing the weight of the bat count as contextual variation?
Also, I’m doing micro drills for a game. There is an option to rotate the camera. Practically speaking, you’ll never actually rotate the camera in an actually game, but would this count as contextual variation and thus be a desirable difficulty?
Videos to Keep indeed! LOL
I hate making mistakes. They are one of my biggest weaknesses.
How about you start seeing it as your biggest mistake that you don’t want to make mistakes
Problem sets: desirable difficulty?
If only baseball players had access to weight rooms, so that they could get stronger without gimmicks like putting things on their bats.