Desirable Difficulties - How Learning Works

What are desirable difficulties and how can we leverage them to improve our learning? What kinds of difficulties are desirable and what kinds are not desirable? This video covers a lot of ground on desirable difficulties, so that you don’t get tripped up next time your friend makes you run through an obstacle course while testing you on your French. For more on effective practice, check out: https://youtu.be/aIPS4ugcanM 00:00 Intro 00:48 Distinction between training and performance 03:14 Desirable difficulties and mistakes 03:48 Spacing 04:45 Interleaving 06:07 Contextual variation 07:08 Difficulties that AREN'T desirable 08:03 Distinguishing desirable from UNdesirable difficulties 10:30 Baseball donut example For more videos on learning, check out my learning community: https://www.benjaminkeep.com/community/ Sign up to my email newsletter, Avoiding Folly, here: https://www.benjaminkeep.com/ Short article on desirable difficulties: https://teaching.yale-nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2016/02/Making-Things-Hard-on-Yourself-but-in-a-Good-Way-2011.pdf Research on bat weights, first page does a pretty good job of summarizing the research: https://www.koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO201332479080172.pdf. Image of the baseball weight from Driveline Baseball: https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/2014/09/post-activation-potentiation-weighted-baseballs/ If you’re looking for more, a Google scholar search (scholar.google.com) for “desirable difficulties” will yield a lot of good stuff. Especially look for articles written by Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork.