Today, blog 1 (Demystifying desirable difficulties 1: What they are) and shortly, blog 2 (Demystifying desirable difficulties 2: What they’re NOT). In this 2-part blog, we attempt to clear the fog, demystifying what Robert Bjork, and later with his wife and co-researcher Elizabeth Bjork actually meant when they wrote about and studied desirable difficulties (as have many others!), hoping that we can stick to their definition and call the ‘other things’… other things. In short, as Donald Clark (2022) says so eloquently in his book ‘Learning Experience Design’: “Ignorance or avoidance of theory within learning design practice begs the question – what practice?” (p. 4) Understanding a theory for what it is and isn’t helps us to have clear discussions and make well-informed design decisions. Doing this often leads to improper use, a loss of efficacy and power, and even lethal mutations. To us, it doesn’t make sense to take a theory and then run with it, making it into something else. In the context of desirable difficulties, we’ve seen many examples where people moved away from how Bjork defined and intended it, and just use the term as ‘layman’s language’. This also happened to Anders Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice where people think that if you practice ‘on purpose’ (and not accidentally?) that the practice was deliberate and that it was, thus, deliberate practice. Unfortunately, desirable difficulties are also often misunderstood or have been diluted to whatever people consider to be ‘desirable difficulties’ in plain language. And they’re difficulties because they pose challenges for the learner. As Bjork explains in this video, they’re desirable because they enhance the very target of training and instruction, namely long-term retention and transfer of knowledge and skills. This is great because desirable difficulties have been shown to be important for learning and learning design. Desirable difficulties, a term coined by Robert Bjork in 1994, has gained traction.
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