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 remembering.

When you are learning a new skill, you are trying to rewire a specific part of your brain; changing and making new connections between neurons. This change can only happen when you challenge yourself and make things more difficult. If things are easy, you are probably using the circuits that already exists.

Connections between neurones in the brain are plastic, and making the brain work is what seems to make a difference. By challenging yourself, you start to use slightly more complex networks, and then you make these circuits more robust by using them repeatedly.

Illusions of Mastery

You have just learned a new dance move in your salsa class. You do it over and over again, and you get it right every time. Surely you must have mastered it. Then you show up in the next class, and you’re completely blank. You have no idea how it even starts, and what follows is also a vague memory.

What happened? Yesterday, the move seemed to work perfectly. Well, yesterday, the move was in your short-term memory, and you remembered it so well because you had repeated it many times in a row. The conditions were easy. This type of repeated practice often gives the illusion of mastery but doesn’t provide a correct picture of whether or not you have learned something.

When this happens, you may think that there is something wrong with you. Calm down. This is just the way the learning process works for everyone. But it means that you should practice smarter if you want to improve your learning. Your goal probably isn’t to do a salsa move five minutes after you learned it. Instead, you want to be able to do it later that night, and in months and years to come.

Effective Methods

Methods that improve your skill learning have one thing in common. They make the exercises a bit harder at first but eventually leads to better memory of how to perform the skill correctly. Some methods that improve your skill learning are spaced repetition, increased variation and complexity and retrieval practice.

Spaced Repetition — Practice spaced out in time leads to more reliable memory for something than just repeating it lots of times in a short time. This happens because embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces of the brain’s representation of the new learning are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge; a process that happens over time.

When you are first learning something, you need to repeat it relatively quickly, say the next day. Then you want to increase the interval between the repetitions, for example to three days, one week, two weeks and one month. If you can still remember how to do something correctly after an extended period, you have learnt it very well.

Variation and Complexity — To improve your learning of a skill you should practice in varied and more complex situations.

Often what happens is that we perform exercises in practice that focus on improving a specific detail of our skills. We can focus all our attention on this detail. But when we then arrive in a game situation or real life, conditions have changed, everything is more complex. And we are not able to do it anymore.

To improve your ability to translate your practice into real life or complex situations, you must practice in varied and complex conditions. Only if you can perform a skill under challenging circumstances at practice, are you likely to perform it consistently in a chaotic game.

To challenge yourself and check how well you know a skill, you want to vary practice. Vary the exercises, the environment, the distractions, the rules, the weather and any other element that can affect performance. You want to make it difficult on purpose.

This is useful because, in real life, the circumstances, situations, conditions and opportunities change all the time. If you are playing in a game with opponents, they will also try to make things difficult on purpose. To prepare for this, you need to practice a skill under various and challenging conditions. The optimal way to practice is if you can make practice more challenging than the actual game. If you can perform a skill under these conditions, it will be easier to perform well during a match.

I experienced an example of how important small changes can be when I was learning salsa. I was mostly learning new moves while facing a wall with a mirror. But as soon as I was facing another direction in the room, my memory for the move was entirely forgotten, and I couldn’t do it. Small differences like this can mean a lot for performance.

To make sure you have learnt something, it helps to vary the drills and the environment. Do them in different locations, with varying distances, and under different weather conditions. Because when you come to a real game, situations are always unique and changing, and this could limit your ability to perform the skill.

Retrieval — Effortful retrieval creates more robust learning and retention. When the mind has to work, learning sticks better. The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval. Retrieval enhances memory and interrupts forgetting.

Any time that you, as a learner, look up an answer or have somebody tell or show you how to do something that you could have remembered drawing on your prior knowledge, you rob yourself of a powerful learning opportunity.

Try your best to remember something before you ask for help and if you see someone that is about to remember something, let them think for a while before helping them out.

Almost forgetting something

The perfect time to practice is when you’ve almost forgotten something. If you can perform a technique, remember a word or make the correct decision in a challenging situation, it will strengthen your memory. You are more likely to be able to repeat the action in a future scenario.

Language learning apps such as Duolingo, Memrise and Anki takes advantage of this when you are learning vocabulary. When you first learn a word, it needs to be repeated quickly, or you will forget it. But after that, you repeat it with longer and longer intervals, until it finally becomes part of your long term memory.

But this principle can also be applied when learning other skills, such as dance moves, piano songs or techniques in Thai Massage.

When you space out practise at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, retrieval is more difficult and feels less productive. Still, the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application in later settings.

First, you need to create something to remember

When learning a new skill, it is crucial to repeat it many times. There is no need to make learning difficult before you’ve learnt something. But as soon as you start getting it correct most of the time, you should start challenging yourself by making the conditions more difficult.

Undesirable Difficulties

To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through effort. If the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to challenges successfully, they become undesirable difficulties.

If you make an exercise too difficult in relation to your skill level, two things will happen.

1. They will not be able to do it correctly.
2. They will feel frustrated and overwhelmed because they are not even close to doing it correctly.

Creating the Optimal Practice Environment

A good coach will adjust the difficulty of exercises so that they push you to perform close to the edge of your current abilities. And as you improve, the coach will make the tasks more difficult, to keep you in the optimal learning zone.

If you don’t have a coach, you must be good at assessing your skill level and choosing the most suitable exercises to learn. Remember that this type of learning is not supposed to feel easy and that you learn best by continuously pushing yourself.

Take home message — What does this mean for how you should practice?

What counts as a desirable difficulty is individual and depends on the current skill level of you as a learner.

To make learning more difficult will improve your memory, and you will be more likely to apply what you have learnt in novel situations.

Making learning easy by repeating the same thing over and over, may seem more effective at the time, but is not necessarily indicating that you have mastered something.

To check whether you have learnt something, practice in varied and complex situations.

When learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

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