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Desirable Difficulty — Why Making Learning More Difficult Improves Your Skill Development
The struggle when learning a skill is one of the most effective ways to learn.
We often think that we are learning best when what we are doing is easy. This is not necessarily the case. Instead, it may indicate that you are doing something that you already know and that you’re not pushing to improve your abilities.
By making learning more difficult (but not too difficult), you will improve your skills faster. Such short-term obstacles that improve learning are called ‘desirable difficulties’.
It was a term coined by Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, who in their research found that conditions that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer. Whereas conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimise long-term retention and transfer.
In other words, you remember things for longer and can apply what you learn more easily to new situations when you create more challenging learning conditions.
Why is it so?
Difficulties are desirable because they strengthen encoding and retrieval processes that improve learning, comprehension, and…
