THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING AND THE LEARNING OF SCIENCE INTRODUCING DESIRABLE DIFFICULTIES

Students’ performance during instruction is commonly viewed as a measure of learning and abasis for evaluating and selecting instructional practices. Laboratory findings question thatview: Conditions of practice that appear optimal during instruction can fail to support long-termretention and transfer of knowledge and, remarkably, conditions that introduce difficulties forthe learner — and appear to slow the rate of the learning — can enhance long-term retentionand transfer. Such “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) include: spacing rather than massingstudy sessions; interleaving rather than blocking practice on separate topics; varying howto-be-learned material is presented; reducing feedback; and using tests as learning events.Our project, funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), focuses on whether the benefits of desirable difficulties generalize to realistic educational materials and contexts. In a coordinated series of laboratory and classroom experiments involving college and middle-school students, respectively, we have examined whether introducing desirable difficulties can improve the effectiveness of Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE, http://wise.berkeley.edu) projects. WISE modules, on science topics such as astronomy, genetic inheritance, and chemical reactions, are customizable and are used extensively by middle- and high-school teachers around the world. Among the advantages of WISE as a research tool is that we can study variations in instruction delivered in the same classroom and also quickly propagate promising practices to new modules