Questions on Desirable Difficulties, part 2
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #102
Last time, I tackled a very common question about desirable difficulties: exactly how difficult should we make a task for it to be as beneficial as possible? Check out that post here!
Next, I want to raise what is probably the next most frequently asked questions about desirable difficulties:
Will these techniques work for my students?
More specifically, can we apply techniques such as spacing, retrieval and varied practice across the board … or are they only suitable for some learners? That’s what I’ll focus on today.
Where’s the evidence?
The question of whether desirable difficulties work for all students and all material is a really important one.
It is also a difficult one to answer purely on the basis of research studies. Here’s why: the chances are that nobody has tested all of these techniques in a classroom exactly like yours.
Unfortunately, it’s also true that many studies are conducted with academically able undergraduates. This doesn’t make the research unreliable, but it does pose an issue in terms of whether the findings generalise to other groups.
Evidence vs. theory
In my view, this links to a broader issue in how we apply cognitive science principles (and how we apply science in general). We can draw on two key sources:
Evidence, such as experiments that test a principle in the classroom
Theory, based on our understanding of how learning works
I would argue that where specific evidence is lacking or patchy, we should use theory to fill in the gaps.
Again, this is how science works in general. If we know how gravity works, we don’t need to drop every kind of object out of a plane or fire it into space to know how it’s going to behave. We can predict this, based on theory, which in turn is based on lots of other studies that built our general understanding of the principles.
Our understanding of learning
An objection to the above is that perhaps we don’t understand memory and learning quite as well as we understand some other areas of science. That’s probably true, and it means that our predictions could be wrong.
Theoretical understanding is like joining the dots, where the dots are research studies. However, many dots are missing, and some are in the wrong place!
However, this is why cognitive science principles like retrieval practice are often described as ‘best bets’.
We can’t absolutely guarantee that they will work in every circumstance; there are always new and unexpected findings that emerge. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s safest to assume that retrieving from memory will be more effective than passive re-reading, for example, or that spacing beats massed practice.
Gaps in the evidence
What I’ve said so far makes an assumption that the research studies we have are getting us closer to general truths about cognitive science.
But what if the studies are flawed, biased, or don’t look at diverse enough populations? This would be a major issue – by the ‘join the dots’ analogy, it would be like having missing parts of the puzzle with no dots at all.
Fortunately, things are not as bad as that; we do actually have evidence from diverse groups including younger and older learners. Still, it remains a concern.
I will pick up this issue next time!
Thanks for reading, and have a good week,
Jonathan
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