Progress Over Time- Part 3- Social and Motivational Factors Involved in Using Desirable Difficulties

In this series of blog posts, I will share with you memos that I am issuing to all teaching staff at my school, Wyvern College, to update them on a whole-school ‘Progress Over Time’ teaching & learning development initiative. The teachers at Wyvern are a talented, highly-committed and special group of people. I’m sure you will agree, the work they are producing in exploring how to effectively implement retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving is quite inspirational…

Earlier posts in this series:

Part 1 -Using Research- How Robust is the Effect

Part 2- Individual Practice Implications for Teachers

Progress Over Time- Part 3- Social and Motivational Factors Involved in Using Desirable Difficulties

To assess learning, assessments should be t……………….-d…………………. and c…………………..-v………………………..

One of the fundamental ideas relating to Desirable Difficulties is that the teaching strategies which build deep, long-lasting learning are more challenging and ‘slower-wins’ than teaching that aims for rapid performance-boosting, but short-lived progress gains. ‘No pain, no gain’, ‘delayed gratification’, however you want to frame it, this is a finding that has been highly replicable in the research.

As teachers know all too well, in general terms, humans in many contexts are often not wired to choose the more challenging option! For example, rereading through some revision notes is much easier to do than creating a quiz on the same content then taking it yourself a number of times. Rereading, particularly if you do it a few times quickly, builds up a sense of familiarity that is easy to mistake for learning. Retrieval practice is much more effortful, and it quickly highlights specific areas where you don’t yet have sufficient retention.

So in summary, ‘consumption’ strategies such as rereading and watching videos that quickly build a ‘feeling of knowing’ feel good because they give rapid, short-term performance gains which can be highly motivating. Conversely, ‘retrieval’ strategies such as low-stakes quizzing, flashcards etc. suppress early performance gains to maximise learning (which cannot be seen by the student until a later date). The instant gratification, buy today-pay tomorrow society in which we live undoubtedly makes the ‘efficient learning is effortful’ a hard-sell to students. The now widely discredited ‘learning styles’ theory was based on just the opposite: easy learning is the best learning.  I think it’s more than just social conditioning though. We seem to have a natural sub-conscious tendency to gravitate towards decisions in which we get instant and positive feedback.

When it comes to motivation, particularly with students of an age where they are still developing the ability to make judgements about their learning metacognitively, I think it is an essential factor for teachers to consider when implementing retrieval, spacing and interleaving etc. We have some exploration and ideas surfacing within the college for how to do this efficiently, but in schools and academia, I think this is still very much in its infancy. Managing student motivation while delivering retrieval, spacing and interleaving is a real priority area where we need both more research and more practical experimentation, evaluation and sharing amongst teachers in schools.

As already discussed in a previous memo, Craig noticed that he could deliver retrieval practice quizzes on a daily basis rather than a weekly basis if he used multiple-choice rather than free-recall answer formats. Interestingly, during their cluster research work this year, Emma and Karen noticed motivation benefits from using a multiple-choice format answers with students too.

Retrieval practice requires somewhat of a ‘Goldilocks’ approach. If the spacing between retrievals is too long then there is a high likelihood that during a free-recall test you won’t be able to retrieve the information successfully, and that is pointless; it is an undesirable, rather than desirable difficulty. Particularly during the first or second time that we ask students to retrieve something, to have a successful retrieval the time intervals need to be relatively short. The intervals should expand out quite quickly after that. We are constrained by our timetable and curriculum structures of course; if you see a class once per week, you can’t quiz any shorter than a week spacing at the start. There is no doubt in my mind that in real-world classrooms there is a time, place and context in which using multiple-choice questioning is appropriate because it boosts students’ likelihood of having a successful (partial) retrieval during the first couple of times they are expected to recall some information. This scaffolding has a positive effect, not only just for learning, but also for motivation too. Students are more inclined to engage with tasks in which they score better.

So while in theory we’d all be doing free-recall tests all the time and quizzing students just before the point at which they forget information, in the real world of education we are influenced by timetabling constraints and student motivation etc. Consequently for us, I think there is a strong argument that the best implementation of retrieval practice in some contexts would be to start with scaffolding strategies such as multiple-choice questions, cued answers (first letters given etc.) and then transition to free-recall quizzing (no cues given) after the first few attempts when students can retrieve the information successfully after a spacing gap of a few weeks etc. This is all getting rather deep! Let’s summarise…

From Emma’s work so far and my experience of using Desirable Difficulties (including seeing significant benefits) for a few years now, I think it’s reasonable to offer students some strategies, particularly early on in low-stakes quizzing etc., that support their performance. Things such as multiple-choice answer formats, giving first letters of answers etc. do support students’ motivation and thus their retrieval success later on down the line. However, these strategies should transition towards pure free-recall (no cues) after students have shown you they can successfully retrieve the scaffolded information over a period of a few weeks.

The skill and judgement of the teacher are essential here, and you are balancing theoretical optimum strategies versus students’ motivation factors which work against these strategies, and it is just that, a balance. You know better than anyone else where Goldilocks sits in your classes’ learning journeys.

There is research going on as we speak into these ideas in Prof Jeff Karpicke’s lab at Purdue University, Indiana. However, I think this is an area where real insights could come from the coal face and teachers sharing their findings such as Emma and Karen’s ongoing great work…

Next up, let’s look at we’ve learned so far about designing our curricula and schemes of work using Desirable Difficulties such that they can enhance student outcomes.

To assess learning, assessments should be time-delayed and contextually-varied.

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