'Bjork & Bjork's Desirable Difficulties in Action' by Jade Pearce and Isaac Moore

Learning is often counterintuitive, and all teachers know how often their pupils turn to ineffective practices. Learners so often understandably want to default to easiness, whereas many decades of educational research have shown that some level of difficulty aids long-term progress.

Jade Pearce and Isaac Moore’s Bjork and Bjork’s Desirable Difficulties in Action in the increasingly valuable series edited by Tom Sherrington shows how this works in practice. After an overview of memory and learning (still not familiar to many), they look at spacing, varying conditions of practice, interleaving and practice testing, finishing off with ‘Desirable difficulties in independent learning’. I found the last of these particularly interesting, since I am right now looking at pupils struggling to work out how best to learn independently (of me):

It has been shown previously that students’ judgements of learning are often inaccurate as they mistake fluency, retrieval strength and short-term performance for long-term learning. (70)

Pearce and Moore suggest ways in which testing can be used for self-study and strategies for motivation learners using desirable difficulties.

This 82-page is clear, punchy and helpful. As with all volumes in the In Action series, it includes case studies, summaries at the end of each chapters, and detailed references for teachers who wish to go further.