Desirable Difficulties, Variation and Creativity
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #143
This week the update has been co-authored by the fabulous Dr Claire Badger of InnerDrive. Claire and I previously worked on a book (Creativity for Teachers), and I reached out to her when I began drafting the post. She was kind enough to contribute her ideas and knowledge. It will also be published on the InnerDrive blog.
The concept of desirable difficulties has become well known among those interested in the links between cognitive science and education. We wanted to take this further today, by making at least a tentative link to creativity.
Just to remind you, desirable difficulties are features of a task that make things harder for students, leading to more errors, but are helpful for learning over the long term. Spacing out practice is an example of a desirable difficulty, as explained way back in update #10:
“The reason that desirable difficulties help is that they make practice more similar to real life. Instead of being predictable, passive and short-term, it becomes varied, active, and requires the retrieval of previously-learned memory and skills.” (read more).
Difficulties such as the spacing effect can boost both retention of studied material and transfer of that learning to new situation, in comparison with easier strategies such as re-reading. That’s what makes them desirable.
Links to creative thinking
So, how do desirable difficulties interact with creativity? One connection is fairly simple – the more we learn, the more potential we have to come up with new creative ideas. This is because higher-order skills such as creativity depend on knowledge stored in long-term memory.
One connection with desirable difficulties, therefore, is that any technique that leads to better retention in memory will indirectly be good for creativity.
It seems obvious when you put it that way, perhaps, but in our experience, this is not reflected in educational practice and discourse. Quite the reverse – memory-focused strategies are often seen as being in opposition to creativity. This is a false dichotomy, because:
If you remember more, you have more basic building blocks from which to form new creative ideas;
The evidence suggests that eminent creativity, for example by scientists and composers, tends to draw on an extensive period of learning.
You can read more about the links between memory and creativity in update #28.
Variation
Of course, having new creative ideas is not just about recalling from memory. You also need to make new connections among those ‘building blocks’ – putting old ideas together in new ways.
This can be helped by practising in a varied way, while rote repetition is unhelpful. Interestingly, varied practice is also a desirable difficulty, as studied by researchers like Robert Bjork (e.g. Bjork, 1994):
“Critical information needs to be multiply encoded, not bound to single sets of semantic or situational cues” (Bjork, 1994, p. 188).
Variation in the way we practice leads to ideas sticking better in memory, and improves the flexibility of those memories. We are more likely to recognise the relevance of previously learned ideas, and to apply them in new ways.
It’s a short step from there to creativity!
Indeed, creativity researchers Gube & Lajoie (2020) have contrasted the effects on expertise of repetitive practice with practice that is more varied:
competence gained through simple repetition leads to a lack of flexibility in thinking;
rote repetition leads to routine expertise – learners can do a familiar task well, but they lack flexibility;
varied practice leads to the ability to transfer and innovate.
Overall, what this means for educators is that we should look for ways to vary practice, especially after basic mastery has been achieved. This could include mixing up the context of tasks, changing the location, making problems look superficially different, combining topics, and much more.
Adaptive Expertise
Routine expertise brings with it a certain level of automaticity. It frees up cognitive resources, making the expert more efficient in their thinking and actions. However, this can come at a cost, as routine expertise is highly domain-specific and doesn’t transfer well to other tasks.
For example, you might have a favourite meal that you can pull together very quickly without the need to consult a recipe book. However, you may struggle when faced with an unfamiliar kitchen or without access to your usual ingredients.
This situation contrasts with what is known as adaptive expertise. Adaptive experts have interconnected, flexible knowledge which allows them to respond more effectively to novel situations. A cook with adaptive expertise will have a much deeper understanding of why recipes work, and when faced with a change in circumstances, will be able to swap out ingredients and adapt the cooking methods to create a successful meal.
Within education, routine expertise might make students very efficient at a limited set of problems or tasks but put a ceiling on future progress. For example, a formula triangle in Science or a paragraph structure such as PEEL (point, evidence, elaboration, link) might help students be successful in the initial stages of learning but such students will probably struggle when required to complete more complex calculations or write a more original and analytical essay.
If we want our students to build adaptive expertise there are several things we can do. Varied practice, as discussed above, is one approach. Another is to carefully consider the nature of the supports and scaffolds that we provide. Simplicity and repetition can be valuable in the early stages, but we need to consider when these scaffolds are no longer required, pushing students out of their comfort zone so that they do not become overly reliant on familiar strategies.
Uncertainty
A further approach to building adaptive expertise in students is to make use of uncertainty in the pedagogical process.
There is plenty of research to support the idea that randomness and disorder can contribute to creativity (see e.g. Kim & Zhong, 2017; Stefl & Rohm, 2017). But how do we introduce uncertainty into schools without things descending into chaos?
Researcher Ron Beghetto (Beghetto, 2019) suggests that this might be achieved via ‘structured uncertainty’. Beghetto does not argue for the complete removal of structured activities where students are required to work through routine tasks. However, he does argue that if we never allow students to grapple with uncertainty, we are ultimately doing them a disservice.
His suggested approach involves what he calls ‘lesson unplanning’. Assuming that most learning activities can be thought of as having four elements – problem, process, product and criteria – lesson unplanning involves removing one of these elements to create some uncertainty:
Problem – students could come up with their own questions or problems to tackle;
Process – asking students to come up with multiple ways to solve a problem;
Product – varying the format of the outcome, such as replacing a past paper question with a video tutorial or debate;
Criteria – rather than relying on published mark schemes linked to high stakes assessments, could the class come up with shared criteria on what ‘good’ would look like for a particular assignment?
An important caveat is that students must have sufficient knowledge before embarking on lesson unplanning. If students are struggling with basic ideas, then introducing uncertainty is likely to cause confusion and potentially embed misconceptions.
So, whilst uncertainty is not usually included in lists of desirable difficulties, it deserves to be considered as a strategy that, although it may result in a dip in short term performance, ultimately leads to deeper learning. Particularly if your goal is to develop creative and curious students.
And all the best for the coming week,
Jonathan and Claire B.
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.
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