LIFE Colloquium: Marcia Linn on “Desirable Difficulties in Learning”
On November 23rd, 2005, Professor Marcia Linn from UC Berkeley visited the LIFE Center and gave a talk at the University of Washington on “Merging classroom and laboratory research traditions: Knowledge integration and desirable difficulties.”
ABSTRACT: The Introducing Desirable Difficulties for Educational Applications in Science (IDDEAS) project merges insights from laboratory studies of learning with results from classroom studies using the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) (see also the TELS Center). In laboratory studies with straightforward materials psychologists show that conditions that introduce certain desirable difficulties for the learner — and appear to slow the rate of the learning — can enhance long-term retention and transfer. One desirable difficulty, substituting a requirement that learners generate a response for the opportunity to engage in additional study of material is also widely used in embedded assessments in technology-enhanced classroom learning.
In the research reported here we vary the forms of generation and compare generation consistent with work in laboratory studies to generation found in embedded assessments informed by the knowledge integration framework. We explore the effectiveness of the generation effect in two settings: undergraduate laboratory experiments and middle school classrooms. In all studies, the generation effect was demonstrated to improve retention and learning. In laboratory studies, the generation condition was significantly more successful than the read condition for single facts. In classroom studies asking students to reflect across topics was more successful than reflecting on single topics. These studies show the benefit of testing laboratory ideas in classrooms, enabling researchers to broaden knowledge about how principles of learning and memory operate in practice. Exploring generation in laboratory and classroom studies reveal the challenging design decisions faced by researchers wishing to make laboratory findings relevant to classroom instruction.
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