the ability to apply what you’ve learned in new settings. In the Cal Poly batting practice experiment, the act of overcoming the diffi culties posed by random types of pitches built a broader “vocabulary” of mental pro cesses for discerning the nature of the challenge (e.g., what the pitcher is throwing) and selecting among possible responses than did the narrower mental pro cesses suffi cient for excelling during massed, non-varied experience. Recall the grade school students who proved more adept at tossing beanbags into three- foot baskets after having practiced tossing into two- and four- foot baskets, compared to the students who only practiced tossing into three-foot basket. Recall the increasing diffi culty and complexity of the simulation training in jump school, or the cockpit simulator of Matt Brown’s business jet.
Priming the Mind for Learning
When you’re asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered. When you’ve bought your fi shing boat and are attempting to attach an anchor line, you’re far more likely to learn and remember the bowline knot than when you’re standing in a city park being shown the bowline by a Boy Scout who thinks you would lead a richer life if you had a handful of knots in your repertoire.
Other Learning Strategies That Incorporate Desirable Diffi culties
We usually think of interference as a detriment to learning, but certain kinds of interference can produce learning benefi ts, and the positive effects are sometimes surprising. Would you rather read an article that has normal type or type that’s somewhat out of focus? Almost surely you would opt for the
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former. Yet when text on a page is slightly out of focus or presented in a font that is a little diffi cult to decipher, people recall the content better. Should the outline of a lecture follow the precise fl ow of a chapter in a textbook, or is it better if the lecture mismatches the text in some ways? It turns out that when the outline of a lecture proceeds in a different order from the textbook passage, the effort to discern the main ideas and reconcile the discrepancy produces better recall of the content. In another surprise, when letters are omitted from words in a text, requiring the reader to supply them, reading is slowed, and retention improves. In all of these examples, the change from normal pre sen ta tion introduces a diffi culty— disruption of fl uency— that makes the learner work harder to construct an interpretation that makes sense. The added effort increases comprehension and learning. (Of course, learning will not improve if the diffi culty completely obscures the meaning or cannot be overcome.)13
The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation. Even if you’re being quizzed on material you’re familiar with, the simple act of fi lling in a blank has the effect of strengthening your memory of the material and your ability to recall it later. In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefi ts. Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still. Overcoming these mild diffi culties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher- order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge conferred by others.
When you’re asked to supply an answer or a solution to something that’s new to you, the power of generation to aid
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learning is even more evident. One explanation for this effect is the idea that as you cast about for a solution, retrieving related knowledge from memory, you strengthen the route to a gap in your learning even before the answer is provided to fi ll it and, when you do fi ll it, connections are made to the related material that is fresh in your mind from the effort. For example, if you’re from Vermont and are asked to name the capital of Texas you might start ruminating on possibilities: Dallas? San Antonio? El Paso? Houston? Even if you’re un-sure, thinking about alternatives before you hit on (or are given) the correct answer will help you. (Austin, of course.) Wrestling with the question, you rack your brain for something that might give you an idea. You may get curious, even stumped or frustrated and acutely aware of the hole in your knowledge that needs fi lling. When you’re then shown the solution, a light goes on. Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep pro cessing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot. It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.14
The act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as refl ection. After a lecture or reading assignment, for example, you might ask yourself: What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? Following an experience where you are practicing new knowledge or skills, you might ask: What went well? What could have gone better? What
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might I need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might I use the next time to get better results?
Refl ection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).
One form of refl ection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.” In essence, students refl ect on a recent class topic in a brief writing assignment, where they may express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other concepts covered in class, or perhaps outside class. (For an example, read in Chapter 8 about the
“learning paragraphs” Mary Pat Wenderoth assigns her students in her human physiology course.) The learning benefi ts from the various cognitive activities that are engaged during refl ection (retrieval, elaboration, generation) have been well established through empirical studies.
An interesting recent study specifi cally examined “write to learn” as a learning tool. Over eight hundred college students in several introductory psychology classes listened to lectures throughout the semester. Following the pre sen ta tion of a key concept within a given lecture, the instructor asked students to write to learn. Students generated their own written summaries of the key ideas, for example restating concepts in their own words and elaborating on the concepts by generating examples of them. For other key concepts presented during the lecture, students were shown a set of slides summarizing the concepts and spent a few minutes copying down key ideas and examples verbatim from the slide.
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What was the result? On exams administered during the semester, the students were asked questions that assessed their understanding of the key concepts that they had worked on learning. They scored signifi cantly (approximately half a letter grade) better on the ones they had written about in their own words than on those they had copied, showing that it was not simply exposure to the concepts that produced the learning benefi t. In follow- up tests approximately two months later to mea sure retention, the benefi ts of writing to learn as a form of refl ection had dropped but remained robust.15
Failure and the Myth of Errorless Learning In the 1950s and 1960s, the psychologist B. F. Skinner advocated the adoption of “errorless learning” methods in education in the belief that errors by learners are counterproductive and result from faulty instruction. The theory of errorless learning gave rise to instructional techniques in which learners were spoonfed new material in small bites and immediately quizzed on them while they still remained on the tongue, so to speak, fresh in short- term memory and easily spit out onto the test form. There was virtually no chance of making an error. Since those days we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short-
term memory is an in
effec tive learning
strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material. Yet in our Western culture, where achievement is seen as an indicator of ability, many learners view errors as failure and do what they can to avoid committing them. The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it’s the errors that they will learn.16
This is a misguided impulse. When learners commit errors and are given corrective feedback, the errors are not learned.
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Even strategies that are highly likely to result in errors, like asking someone to try to solve a problem before being shown how to do it, produce stronger learning and retention of the correct information than more passive learning strategies, provided there is corrective feedback. Moreover, people who are taught that learning is a struggle that often involves making errors will go on to exhibit a greater propensity to tackle tough challenges and will tend to see mistakes not as failures but as lessons and turning points along the path to mastery.
To see the truth of this, look no further than the kid down the hall who is deeply absorbed in working his avatar up through the levels of an action game on his Xbox video console.
A fear of failure can poison learning by creating aversions to the kinds of experimentation and risk taking that characterize striving, or by diminishing per for mance under pressure, as in a test setting. In the latter instance, students who have a high fear of making errors when taking tests may actually do worse on the test because of their anxiety. Why? It seems that a signifi cant portion of their working memory capacity is expended to monitor their per for mance (How am I doing? Am I making mistakes?), leaving less working memory capacity available to solve the problems posed by the test. “Working memory” refers to the amount of information you can hold in mind while working through a problem, especially in the face of distraction. Everyone’s working memory is severely limited, some more than others, and larger working memory capacities correlate with higher IQs.
To explore this theory about how fear of failure reduces test per for mance, sixth graders in France were given very diffi cult anagram problems that none of them could solve. After struggling unsuccessfully with the problems, half of the kids received a ten- minute lesson in which they were taught that diffi culty is a crucial part of learning, errors are natural and to be expected, and practice helps, just as in learning to ride a
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bicycle. The other kids were simply asked how they had gone about trying to solve the anagrams. Then both groups were given a diffi cult test whose results provided a mea sure of working memory. The kids who had been taught that errors are a natural part of learning showed signifi cantly better use of working memory than did the others. These children did not expend their working memory capacity in agonizing over the diffi culty of the task. The theory was further tested in variations of the original study. The results support the fi nding that diffi culty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with diffi culty.”17
These studies point out that not all diffi culties in learning are desirable ones. Anxiety while taking a test seems to represent an undesirable diffi culty. These studies also underscore the importance of learners understanding that diffi culty in learning new things is not only to be expected but can be benefi cial. To this point, the French study stands on the shoulders of many others, among the foremost being the works of Carol Dweck and of Anders Ericsson, both of whom we discuss in Chapter 7 in relation to the topic of increasing intellectual abilities. Dweck’s work shows that people who believe that their intellectual ability is fi xed from birth, wired in their genes, tend to avoid challenges at which they may not succeed, because failure would appear to be an indication of lesser native ability. By contrast, people who are helped to understand that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control, are more likely to tackle diffi cult challenges and persist at them. They view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the road rather than as a mea sure of inability and the end of the road. Anders Ericsson’s work investigating the nature of expert per for mance shows that to achieve expertise requires thou-
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sands of hours of dedicated practice in which one strives to surpass one’s current level of ability, a pro cess in which failure becomes an essential experience on the path to mastery.
The study of the French sixth graders received wide public-ity and inspired the staging of a “Festival of Errors” by an elite graduate school in Paris, aimed at teaching French schoolchildren that making mistakes is a constructive part of learning: not a sign of failure but of effort. Festival organizers argued that modern society’s focus on showing results has led to a culture of intellectual timorousness, starving the kind of intellectual ferment and risk-taking that produced the great discoveries that mark French history.
It doesn’t require a great conceptual leap to get from Paris’s “Festival of Errors” to San Francisco’s “FailCon,” where technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists meet once a year to study failures that gave them critical insights they needed in order to pivot in their business strategies so as to succeed. Thomas Edison called failure the source of inspiration, and is said to have remarked, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He argued that perseverance in the face of failure is the key to success.
Failure underlies the scientifi c method, which has advanced our understanding of the world we inhabit. The qualities of per sis tence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches. Steve Jobs, in his remarks to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005, spoke of being fi red at age thirty in 1985 from Apple Computer, which he had cofounded. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fi red from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness
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of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
It’s not the failure that’s desirable, it’s the dauntless effort despite the risks, the discovery of what works and what doesn’t that sometimes only failure can reveal. It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon- fed the solution, even if we fall short in our fi rst attempts at an answer.
An Example of Generative Learning
As we said earlier, the pro cess of trying to solve a problem without the benefi t of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling it. Generation is another name for old- fashioned trial and error. We’re all familiar with the stories of skinny kids in Silicon Valley garages messing around with computers and coming out billionaires. We would like to serve up a different kind of example here: Minnesota’s Bonnie Blodgett.
Bonnie is a writer and a self- taught ornamental gardener in a constant argument with a voice in her head that keeps nat-tering about all the ways her latest whim is sure to go haywire and embarrass her. While she is a woman of strong aesthetic sensibilities, she is also one of epic doubts. Her “learning style” might be called leap- before- you- look- because- if- you-look- fi rst- you- probably- won’t-like- what- you- see. Her garden writing appears under the name “The Blundering Gardener.”
This moniker is a way of telling her voices of doubt to take a hike, because what ever the consequences of the next whim, she’s already rolling up her sleeves. “Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have fi gured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into. For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting
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into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.”18
Bonnie’s success shows how struggling with a problem makes for strong learning, and how a sustained commitment to advancing in a par tic u lar fi eld of endeavor through trial-and- error effort leads to complex mastery and greater knowledge of the interrelationships of things. When we spoke, she had just traveled to southern Minnesota to meet with a group of farmers who wanted her gardening insights on a gamut of issues ranging from layout and design to pest control and irrigation. In the years since she fi rst sank her spade, Bonnie’s garden writing has won national recognition and found a devoted following far and wide through many outlets, and her garden has become a destination for other gardeners.
She came to ornamental gardening about the time she found herself eyeballing middle age. She had no training, just a burning desire to get her hands dirty making beautiful spaces on the corner lot of the home she shares with her husband in a historic neighborhood of St. Paul.
