How Can Making Learning More Difficult Improve Learning?

From the Marshall Memo #440

In this intriguing Chronicle of Higher Education article, Assumption College professor James Lang examines the counterintuitive research indicating that when students read material in difficult-to-read, unfamiliar fonts – or when they read arguments with logical gaps – they learn more deeply. He says this confirms a well-established learning principle called cognitive disfluency and has implications for all classrooms. 

The common assumption is that if we find new information easy to process or encode, learning must be proceeding smoothly. But in fact, the opposite is true. Easy learning is often shallow. By contrast, when learning is more challenging, when there are graphic or logical difficulties that students have to deal with, there’s more cognitive engagement, deeper processing, and better long-term learning and retention. “In other words, when students encounter cognitive disfluency, and have to put in more work in processing the material, it may sink in more deeply,” says Lang. This has been demonstrated in experiments with college and high-school students.

“To put this as (over)simply as possible,” he says, “learning material in fluent conditions – easy-to-read fonts, clear causal connections – is like driving to the grocery store on cognitive automatic pilot. You get from Point A to Point B, but you are not really paying close attention, and, hence, are unlikely to remember your trip in any detail later. Learning material in disfluent conditions would be like driving to a grocery store in England if you are an American, having to navigate an unfamiliar route from the other side of the road.”

What are the implications for teachers? If we want learning to be richer, more elaborate, and more “sticky”, we need to find ways to force students out of their normal learning and processing modes into a state of cognitive disfluency. We want them to feel like they are driving on the wrong side of the road. 

But of course we can’t take this too far. Students will rebel or give up if it’s too difficult to read an eye-straining font or if the writing makes no sense. Lang believes there’s a happy medium of “desirable difficulties” that produce enough cognitive disfluency to promote deep learning but not so much that students get discouraged and feel stupid. Here are some general teaching principles that Lang and some colleagues cooked up:

• Ask students to process or translate course material using unusual rhetorical or expressive modes. For example, have students to reduce a concept to a visual representation or a 140-character Twitter message.

• Require students to argue on behalf of unfamiliar positions. For example, a political science professor had students debate the Arab-Israeli conflict from the opposite side of their personal beliefs, and a medical professor did the same with the issue of abortion. “In both cases,” says Lang, “students were forced into the uncomfortable and defamiliarizing position of having to look at a well-trod debate from a new angle.” 

• Ask students to find or identify mistakes. A chemistry teacher asked students to watch for mistakes in her presentations and even deliberately inserted them from time to time. This got students out of automatic pilot and honed a very useful skill, since many jobs require people to review presentations, problems, performances, or communications for accuracy.

• Plan for failure. Rather than proceeding with an experiment correctly, the way the teacher intended, try asking students to plan an experiment that will fail – and understand why. 

“The Benefits of Making It Harder to Learn” by James Lang in The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8, 2012 (Vol. LVIII, #38, p. A33-A34),

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Benefits-of-Making-It/132056/; Lang can be reached at careers@chronicle.com. For a full list of suggestions on “positive disfluency”, see

http://www.jamesmlang.com.