Robert A. Bjork

So almost everybody picks the method that feels good and works worse.

I mean, a UCLA psychologist named Robert Bjork has a name for the good kind of struggle.

He calls it a desirable difficulty.

Desirable? Struggling is desirable?

Immediate performance and longer-term learning aren't necessarily the same thing.

Cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork's work on desirable difficulties makes a related point.

Conditions that make learning slower or harder during acquisition can sometimes improve later retention and transfer, which gives us a distinction that I think matters enormously in the AI era.

Efficiency of answer retrieval and effectiveness of learning are not necessarily the same objective.

Guided hypothesis theory from Schmidt in 1991 was talking about this, which is like, when we guide something, what do we see? There's so much research and so much helpful information from that field, but essentially, again, a quick correction gives you really great short-term feedback and not long-term learning.

And I think Professor Helding talks about this in her book, too, with Robert Bjork, who talks about desirable difficulties, which is that actually you want to create desirable difficulties for your students.

You want to make them struggle a little bit to figure it out because that results in really learning something and not just performing for a quick show in that

moment.

That is where the research becomes much less convincing.

In two thousand and eight, Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork published one of the most influential reviews of the learning styles literature.

They explained what evidence we would actually need in order to show that matching works.

Imagine that we identify one group as visual learners and another group as auditory learners.

We had...

Bob Bjork came eventually and was on my committee.

So there were just lots of discussions about attention and about the broadband view had come.

Fitz and Melton had come out of the army so that they looked at performance, not these kind of.

But introducing challenges that, in the overcoming of them, make for higher order memory representations or better conceptualizations of what this skill is that you're developing, those wind up being better for learning.

And Bob Bjork, who's son's lecture we all love, he calls these desirable difficulties.

They're desirable in the eye of the educator because they make the learner smarter for longer and better at their job for longer.

But they're difficulties because the learner does experience them as difficulty.

So they don't show up and look at the alternator and say, what the hell's a ratchet? They just do what is probably right.

The research for this came from the Nuclear Training Center, where about every 18 months at a power plant or at a nuclear reactor, a situation comes up where you need to act expediently and also not make any mistakes because the consequences are pretty dire.

So the work that Bob Bjork had done on that was sort of how do you set up a practice schedule so that somebody is somebody is always at least very good at responding to this thing correctly, even if they don't encounter it in their on-the-job training.

But you sort of run into a similar situation.