Desirable Difficulty

The Choice of Hercules, Pietro Aquila

The Choice of Hercules

A young Hercules stands at a crossroads and must choose between two paths: Vice, which offers an easy life of pleasure, and Virtue, which offers a difficult life of hard work, honor, and lasting fulfillment. SPOILER ALERT: Hercules chooses Virtue. His choice illustrates the idea that true success and happiness come through effort, character, and perseverance.

DESIRABLE DIFFICULTY

Coined by Psychologist Robert A. Bjork, desirable difficulty refers to instructional strategies that make learning take more effort in the short-term while improving long-term retention, transfer, and future performance. Yes, this is a strategy that makes things harder—at first. (Bjork, 1994)

Here's the thing: practices that make learning feel easy can actually hinder long-term retention, while practices that make learning feel more difficult often produce more durable and transferable knowledge.

ILLUSION OF COMPETENCY

Students naturally judge their learning by how easy it feels. If material is easy to understand (encode), quickly comes to mind (recalled), or practiced on repeat in the same way (applied), students feel a sense of success and confidence. Sadly, that is often all an illusion.

The illusion of competency is the tendency for learners to overestimate their understanding or mastery of material because it feels familiar, even though they may be unable to retrieve, explain, or apply the knowledge independently. (Kruger, J., & Dunning, D., 1999)

The desirable difficulty framework encourages instructors to create opportunities for effortful retrieval, varied practice, and deeper processing rather than relying on strategies that merely feel productive.

Student-athletes understand that results happen when training provides the right level of challenge. A workout that is too easy produces little growth; a workout that is impossibly difficult can lead to failure or injury. Learning works much the same way. Our memory grows stronger when it struggles to retrieve and apply information. The struggle itself is part of the learning process.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying though—desirable difficulty is not "making learning harder". It is making learning more effective, even if it feels harder. This distinction is crucial. A difficulty is not desirable simply because it is difficult.

NEEDLESS "RIGOR"

• Excessive amount of homework
• Readings that are unnecessarily long
• Testing material that was never taught
• Increasing workload without a learning purpose
• Grading harshly to “raise standards”

These practices would serve to increase the student cognitive load, leading to frustration without improving learning.

They are difficulties, but not desirable ones.

A Practical Test

ASK: "WHAT IS THIS CHALLENGE DESIGNED TO STRENGTHEN?"

If the answer is:

• retrieval practice,
• transferring of knowledge,
• elaborating on examples,
• building durability of memory,
• differentiating between concepts,

...then it may be a desirable difficulty.

If the answer is:

• to weed students out,
• to make the course more rigorous,
• because learning should be hard,
• because that's how it was done before,

...then it is probably rigor for rigor's sake.

The goal is not struggle-maxxing. The goal is learn-maxxing.

WHEN CHALLENGE SERVES LEARNING, IT IS DESIRABLE. WHEN CHALLENGE SERVES ONLY APPEARANCE, TRADITION, OR GATEKEEPING—IT BECOMES NEEDLESS RIGOR.

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER STUDENTS ARE STRUGGLING. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER THEIR STRUGGLE IS PRODUCING LEARNING.

Apply Desirable Difficulties

• Focus on long-term retention, not immediate performance.
• Consider spacing practice across multiple class sessions rather than cramming.
• Mixing problem types instead of practicing one type at a time.
• Design learning experiences that require effortful retrieval by asking students to retrieve information from memory before reviewing notes.
• Use assessments as learning opportunities like frequent low-stakes quizzes.
• Expect errors and difficulty as normal parts of learning. Help students understand that feeling challenged often means learning is occurring.

SOURCE(s)

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121