Should Learning be Difficult?

We spend a lot of time helping children learn things, but how much time do we spend thinking about how to best do that? In “The Science of Learning”, we’ll explore what research says about how we best learn. Most importantly, we’ll find out how we can apply theories and research to our real lives as parents, mentors, teachers, and learners. 

For many students, learning is hard. Especially when a subject is challenging for a student, the temptation to give up or assume that they’re just ‘not good’ at a particular subject is strong. In this article, we will explore ways mentors and educators can encourage students to push through when the learning gets tough. 

In support of difficulty

Many students are familiar with the feeling of frustration that can come from ‘not getting it’. Whether it’s a particularly tricky math problem or tongue-twisting words in a book, it’s easy for students who are struggling to feel less competent or intelligent than their peers. 

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Perhaps, however, learning needs to be tricky for it to be stimulating. The process of struggling to understand encourages students to be more innovative in how they learn. It forces them to invest time into mastering a concept. An experiment at California Polytechnic State University supports this idea. In this study, batters who practiced with a random assortment of pitches, which initially required more effort from them and seemed less productive, became stronger hitters over time than those who practiced with isolated pitches (Miller 2016). In other words, the process of struggling helped them improve, even if it didn’t feel that way in the moment.

 Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, term this concept ‘desirable difficulties’. These difficulties are “better conditions of learning that, while apparently creating difficulty, actually lead to more durable and flexible learning” (Bjork & Bjork 2016, p58). From varying how we practice (i.e., the random pitches in the study) or practicing in different places at different times, some difficulty is good for us!

Removing undesirable difficulties

However, just as there are ‘good’ difficulties, there are also a range of undesirable difficulties that do not benefit a student’s learning and create frustration.  Recognizing that, in this section, we’ll take a look at some of the things we can do to assist students when they run into difficulty with learning. These strategies won’t work for every learner, and like in many situations, it will take some experimentation to find out what works best for you and the students you are helping. 

Chunking

‘Chunking’ is the process of putting information together into meaningful groups (Fountain & Doyle 2012) in order to improve our ability to remember them. We use chunking every day to memorize ideas and concepts. For example, the number 18006686868 doesn’t mean much on its own, but break it up into smaller chunks like so - 1 800-668-6868 - and it’s the number for the Kids Help Phone. Similarly, chunking can help students learn. Encouraging students to break information up into categories, to use acronyms, or to look for patterns in the information they are learning will help them with long-term recall. 

Take a Break!

Most of us know that cramming for a test isn’t the best way to study, and in a similar way, cramming learning isn’t the best way to learn. Spacing out our practicing assists in the long-term retention of ideas. Its benefits have been shown in a great number of studies on memory and learning across different tasks and types of learners (Bjork & Bjork 2016, p59). 

Barbara Oakley, author of the famous online course “Learning How to Learn”, also advocates for breaks. “Your brain has two different ways of learning! One is the “focused mode.” That’s when you’re paying close attention to something. The other is the diffuse mode. That’s when you don’t seem to be thinking about anything in particular!”, she explains (Oakley). When we take breaks from a difficult problem, we move from focused to diffuse mode, which can help us see a problem from a new perspective or make a new connection between concepts. 

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Amend the Goal

From an early age, we’ve been taught that giving up is never the solution. And while perseverance is a valuable goal, in learning, it is possible to go too far. We wouldn’t expect someone to pick up calculus before they learn algebra, right? In that same vein, when we’re introducing new ideas to students, sometimes we have to reevaluate learning goals and outcomes to be more realistic. This may mean breaking up an overall goal like memorizing multiplication tables into smaller chunks, or changing our expectations and ensuring that we haven’t set the bar unreasonably high. 

More than anything else, we need to reassure students that finding something difficult isn’t a negative. It doesn’t mean they are less intelligent than their peers who seemed to grasp an idea right away. Struggling with a concept is an investment. It pays off eventually!