The Learner Lab
Each episode we focus on one topic that can help you become a better leader and learner. We do our best to keep it short, useful, and engaging. Whenever possible we bring in the experts to share their research and work.
The Learner Lab
Boosting Learning with Desirable Difficulties with Dr. Elizabeth Bjork and Dr. Robert Bjork
There's a huge gap between what the science says about how we should study, practice, and learn vs how we actually do it. We met with learning experts and UCLA Psychologists Dr. Elizabeth Bjork and Dr. Robert Bjork to figure out how to close that gap.
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Made to Stick
Elizabeth Bjork
Robert Bjork
Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab
According to the googles. A nifty way to start a podcast episode is to bring in some clips from later on to stir up some engagement and excitement. So here's a world renowned psychologist saying the word optimal. Oh, and here's another one saying effective learning strategies,
Speaker 2:learning strategy.
Speaker 1:I'm Trevor, I'm Alex. Welcome to the learner lab podcast presented by[inaudible] dot com each week something new that can help us learn. Let's go Alex. Yes, Trevor. What are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about the science of how to get more from our practice. Love it. Very relevant topic and when we say practice, we just mean like the learning process that's studying people practice in the workplace. It kind of has this connotation with sports, but it's really any skill involves practice, so we're getting, becoming more efficient at learning the skills, right? The cool thing is we had the opportunity to learn from two of the experts.
Speaker 2:I'm Elizabeth of York. I'm a professor in the Department of Psychology. I study learning and memory
Speaker 1:Marie and how to optimize learning and memory.
Speaker 3:And I'm Robert Bjork. I'm also a professor of psychology at Ucla in particular. I'm interested in differences between how people learn versus how they think they learned.
Speaker 1:The heavy hitters, heavy hitters, coolest couple in the learning industry, not even close. Um, so we're going to incorporate their research and weave it through today's conversation. The truth is there's a big gap between what we think to be effective learning strategies and what actually are effective learning strategies. Right. Um, and too, too often this deals with learning versus performance, right? Exactly. It's like we don't understand that those are kind of two different things.
Speaker 3:It's performance is what you can observe and measured learning can only be sort of measured, added the leg. How well does
Speaker 1:knowledge is retained or how well does it transfer to the situation where it's relevant? Performance is like what are we seeing now? And learning is what's sticking. Okay. The distinction is really an important one. That current performance can not only be an imperfect guide, whether learnings happen, it can be exactly misleading. He strategies that really, um, support for, of current performance.
Speaker 2:You're first adapting, they make the students feel I'm learning, this is easy, I'm getting it. And yeah, that's not
Speaker 1:always the case.
Speaker 3:Humberside conditions that appear to induce challenges appear to be slowing. The rate of learning can then enhance term retention and transfer.
Speaker 1:The big idea here is they kind of are opposing forces. So it's Kinda like you gotta choose one or the other if you want it to. It's kind of like we have to be clear on our goals and I hope the goal with the people listening, it's like we want the learning. When our practices easy, we sort of like slip into autopilot. Autopilot is what we're trying to avoid. So at the Bjork say is it's about building what they call desirable difficulties into practice that can help us avoid slipping into autopilot. So we get more from the second,
Speaker 3:one of years ago now, I was label these effective things as desirable difficulties, creating difficulties, slowing the rate of learning if you're looking at current performance, but then they enhanced learning on the longterm. That's a sense in which they're desirable
Speaker 1:to put it into learner lab language. It's what are the ways we can avoid getting into autopilot, right? Like that's the way I see it. Here's how I think about desirable, difficult, okay, I could go to the weight room and do all of these exercises with no weight and you could do the same exercises with weight. Who is going to get more from the workout? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's me. Definitely you. The resistance and struggle created by the way, is going to lead to more growth and development. These desirable difficulties induce a bit of struggle and the struggle helps us remember more like that activates our brain in a different way than if there's no struggle at all. So it's not always about just the sheer amount of reps, it's more of the quality of their reps and that's what desirable difficulties do. They help us get like more from the reps that we're doing. Let's do reps with some weight. Here's the game plan. We're going to talk about two ideas that the Bjorks have outlined in their research and those are spacing and variation, right? Those are the kind of the big themes right after that we're going to get into some like quick hitting, maybe smaller adjustments we could make that would lead to more learning and retention as well. So lots of good tools and takeaways. Let's jump into spacing. Okay. What does this mean? One of the big ideas with spacing is allowing your brain to forget certain things. So what we're trying to forget, yeah. To learn, in order to learn more, we need to forget a little. Okay. Keep going. You keep going. Think about if you had just read a chapter of a book, right? Yup. It's a textbook for your class. You read through it and then you realize your brain was on autopilot. You didn't recognize what was happening. Sure. Uh, you could just go right back into it and reread it again. So there's no spacing there, no spacing there. And when you go through it again, everything is going to seem sort of familiar. It seems so you've already seen it. You're even more on autopilot now. Like, okay, cool. I know this, I've seen it. But in reality, what you should do is wait a little bit, give it some time, maybe wait a couple of hours, go outside, do something else and come back to it. Sure. Your brain has forgotten some of that. It's not as exposed to those ideas and the Bjorks echo this
Speaker 3:search for more than a hundred years. In fact, go on to other things and come back and read it again. Then that produces substantially better, longterm environment.
Speaker 1:Okay. Uh, how does this play out? Good example. In basketball, most common way we practice free throws. It's like shoot 50 free throws at the end of practice. Like everyone does that. There's quite a few MBA teams now because there's a ton of research around this that instead of shooting 50 at the end, they disperse the 50 throughout practice bunches of two or three. That's a great idea. Okay, so let's think of the upsides of that one. It's kind of more like game because you're not going to get never more than three. Yeah, yeah. It's like the restaurant like here, Bro, you get your 35 practice runs and then the two that matter. It's like, no, you get to, right. So it's kind of more like a game and when we're spacing, I think about autopilot. We're less likely to slip it in like 50 straight. Of course I'm going to go rinse and repeat. I'm an autopilot. I'm the fifth shot. You're probably locked in, but when they're dispersed, it's a little more difficult, but I'm not going to slip into autopilot just by the way that the reps are dispersed. Now that brings us back to learning and performance. This is the tough part. It's if you shoot 50 in a row, you're going to make more than if you disperse the 50 throughout. We're going to look worse when we do it properly. Then when we do the non optimal, that's a tough pill to swallow, right? Like that's perhaps the big reason that maybe this stuff isn't as applied as much as it should be. Right? We're kind of going against what we think to be good at versus what is good. So spacing essentially interrupts that autopilot part of your brain and it's an easy solution. Another one of the Bjorks effective learning strategies is called interleaving, which is essentially just introducing variation into your practice. So that's sure. Changing little aspects of the practice to keep your brain alert. Right. And forcing it to do like something else so it doesn't drift into autopilot. And Doctor Bjork says this, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Instead of you doing that sort of block practice, you get the same number of practice trials, the inner league, Brandon, you will look like you're not making as much progress, but you'll make much better longterm primers.
Speaker 1:I have an example of this that sort of upset my sister, but it's, it's useful for everyone else, I think. Grow seed. Yeah. Okay. So my sister was studying for a test using quizlet as college kids do these days. Quizlet, what is that? It's, it's, it's an APP. You know one of those things you've got on your phone and flashcard app back in the day. We use those three by fives. Baby old school. Those work too. This is an example where for bulk, so it's like a, it's a, it's a flashcard APP. Okay. So she's going through, she wants me to quiz her on these flashcards, right? And so we're going through the topics in there. She them organized as the book chapters where, so it's like chapter nine 10 11 and 12 and we're going through it and I hit the shuffle button, which puts them in a random order and I started quizzing her and she goes, wait, that's not the next card. I'm like, damn right. It's not the next car. I shuffled it and she's like, no, it doesn't work that way. I'm like, yeah, that's the only way we're going to learn it. The, the questions on the test aren't going to be in this. We're not going to be in this random, right. Perfect example. You varied the, the order right before you did that. She is an autopilot, which is what happens when we do flashcards, no spacing. And I know what's coming next. So it's like photosynthesis comes Osmosis, right? So perfect example, as well as it doesn't really feel good to practice properly. It doesn't really necessarily look better either. Like she's going to miss more as we go through the shuffled ones. She's going to miss a lot of the hundred percent it's actually helping her better retain that material in the long run. More retention and it's more like the actual test putting in golf. Great example, like hit 50 pounds from the same spot. If we simply scattered those balls out and hit 50 different putts, it's way better 50 from one spot, autopilot to the Max and getting a lot of reps, but I'm not really having to trigger that program each time. Right. If I just scatter them still 50 reps, which is what we need to practice and get better, but the quality of reps are better every time I'm, I'm forced out of autopilot because my brain is forced to make a new read, right, and a new plan and then I execute the pot. You're forced to actively engage with each individual. 100% yeah. This wasted four years of my life not knowing this for years for Whoa. Quick Story. I started on the Varsity basketball team when I was in ninth grade. Okay. I'm not trying to flex again. It was like I'm from Wyoming and we didn't have enough people for sure. Um, I was kind of known as a good three point shooter. My first year, ninth grade I shot 40% from three. That's pretty good. That's pretty and I shot a lot. So big sample size that off season my highschool purchases shooting machine, it's called the gun and it's like a big net. You Hook it up to the hoop and it catches like your misses and throws him back to you so you can get like a ridiculous amount of reps in a short amount of time. It counts your makes and misses. I lived on that thing for the next four years of my life. When I first got it, I would shoot like a hundred in a row and I could make about 60 to 65 out of 100 from the same spot. After four years of like living on the shooting machine, I got to where I could make 90 out of a hundred from what spot? Like really, really? That's crazy. Like on the regular, I could hit 80 and on a good day, 90 out of the hundred from one spot. So, so that translate to the really good. Again, that's the bad part. Guess what? My shooting percentage was my senior year from three. So it was 40% so now maybe it's what like 50% 40 again, oh 40 again and I attempted the same amount. So your boy, we're spending thousands of hours and I saw great improvement in my performance, right? It went from 60 to 90 in zero improvement in the actual learning of the skill and I shot the same amount. Right. So, so if you were to Redo it, do you think there are ways you could have improved the a hundred percent I think the easy one is just introduce more variation. I could just like move in, move out to the left to the right, take a dribble off the catch. It's like there's all sorts of ways to add that variation within this drill where I am getting high reps. So it's not always about just like doing something entirely different, right? It's like we can add that variation. Tweaking little things. Yeah. It's, Bjork talks a lot about Tim Lee bullying
Speaker 3:porter skills researcher and I were interviewed driving range that's near the Los Angeles airport. People there, they're creating conditions that won't, didn't introduce spacing, didn't respect, won't match the conditions on the golf course all up and down the range. You could see people and not very in the club. Not Fair in the target, not stepping back, not, you know. So it's, it's in a lot of gold lanes. Are intuitions mislead us? Are, are common ways of doing things are not.
Speaker 1:All right. So we just looked at spacing and interleaving. So let's touch on a couple other quick hitting ways to improve and boost your retention. Yes. So one of these is what the Bjorks like to call, study to teach. And the basic premise of this is just approaching material that you're learning as if you had to teach someone else about it. Right? So it's sort of in your mind like framing it, I need to learn this material so I can explain it to someone else. Sure. There was this study that they did and they had two different groups. One group, they were going to learn the material and then be tested on it. The other group was told that they were going to have to teach someone in like 30 minutes. So read the chapter and then in 30 minutes someone will come in and you'll have to teach them. Right. And then the person didn't show up. They, they said the person didn't show up, but there was no person ever. But then they had to take the test. So both groups took the test.
Speaker 2:What we found was the people who prepared to teach this material to another student actually perform much better, significantly better than the students who are studying it for themselves to take an exam.
Speaker 1:I had experienced with this first hand, so I took a supply chain class in college and I ended up teaching for the class and the class was really difficult. So when I took the course, I got a B in it, which, you know, it's a fine grade. Um, nerd. It's true though. And then I became the ta for the course later on. And what I realized is I had to relearn all of this material. Sure. But this time I was the lens through the Lens of a teacher, right? I had to help other people learn this material. I ended up started being able to retrieve this stuff a lot better because everything that I was reading through, sure I had to figure out how can I frame this in a way that helps someone else learn it, no autopilot and their autopilot. I gotta be completely engaged.
Speaker 2:This material. How can I help my child with his or her homework? Well, you don't have to know. What you need to do is ask your child to explain it to you. And that process of trying to explain it to you, they'll be engaging in a very effective learning strategies.
Speaker 1:Another small adjustment that can really boost retention and learning is incorporating what they call pretesting before we teach something new. Okay. How's that work? Uh, so best way to explain it as we've been doing this in our workshops, we have a great session on fear and like how we should think about it and talk about it. And before we even begin, we give a pretest. We say, okay, take 30 seconds and go through this scenario. You're working with someone who's afraid to try something new. What would you tell them? It doesn't matter what they write down just as long as you're write. I wrote something down. When we get to that point of the actual presentation, it's like 30 minutes in of what should we say? Everyone's leaning forward because what we're doing is comparing it against our first guests. So the pretest isn't to see what they know or don't know. It's just to like kind of like anchor this in and now I'm more engaged and well, what is the answer? This is such an easy strategy for anyone that's teaching a concept to use. It's like come up with a quick pretest before you explain it. That's it. Even if it's just a simple question, one question, one multiple choice, anything, right? One fill in the blank, the pretest will lead to more engagement. Dr Bureau. It gives an example of how students can apply these principles.
Speaker 2:The one thing that can easily do is just give themselves a pretest, just go, go to the back of the chapter. Really silly to do so. And most of the time they'll be dead wrong. All the answers to then do some of these things as they read. Third, because they're going to be reminded of concepts are going to be reminded of incorrect answers that they picked and they're gonna say, okay, this is now I see why that was incorrect answer. So it's going to make them a more active consumer of that in that chapter.
Speaker 1:Now look, there's like a spectrum on all of this. We're not just saying go very everything so much that we can't handle it. Like the goal is we want sort of this retrieval process. We want it to involve some difficulty, but it needs to work as well. We want tension, but we don't want to be yet. He did. Exactly. And so like even if we're teaching someone a skill right off the bat, we can introduce small variations to make it better. It doesn't have to be exactly the same all the time. And the same is true for teaching a group of people in the workplace and we're learning new technology, new software. It's like we can incorporate some spacing and variation that will lead to more difficulty but more retention. So to recap what we've talked about today, there are a lot of misconceptions with learning and one of the big ones is learning versus performance. If our goal is to boost the learning, we can do that by creating desirable difficulties and some ways that we create desirable difficulties are by spacing our practice, introducing variation, studying to teach and introducing pretests. We'd like to thank the Bjorks for helping us out so much and honestly they're the experts here. You can find a lot of their research in the book, make it stick. If you just Google desirable difficulties in Bjork, you're going to find a lot of research, a ton of studies, a lot of stuff that we just didn't have time to get into today. Jack, we'll put links to all of this stuff. Also, I want to give a special shout out to Richard Schmidt. He like wrote the textbook of motor learning. Um, he passed away a few years ago but I did had have the honor of like hanging out with him and meeting him. I went to his house and went through a lot of this stuff and so a lot of these principles that we talked about today are from his research and so he is a legend. The Bjorks legends. There's like a lot of incredible people in this field that had been doing this work for a long time and now it's, I think time does shine some light on that and like how about we start using some of this stuff? That's the big idea here. Again, we can all do that. Jack is going to load up the questions. We're going to bang those out. You guys are the best. This has been fun. See you next week. Now it's time for the questions. Remember that you can call our question hotline at anytime of the day. 24 seven it's there.(805) 635-8459. Let's go
Speaker 4:on CD from Hartford, Connecticut, Special Ed teacher. How can I do my best to get into my kid's kids perspective? Who's gone through all this trauma when I've really been lucky in life to where I haven't had to deal with trauma like that. Looking forward to hearing answer, hearing from you guys here in the next podcast. Thanks Chris. Bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you sandy for the really fantastic and important question. Obviously we're not the experts with stuff like this, but a few things they do know and maybe some tips. One is no matter who we're working with, we're never going to entirely understand their situation like that's in. We can't have the same experiences of everyone where around and so that kind of sends us down the pathway of like building real empathy is not, I know how you feel. I think real empathy and being a real leader is, I don't know how you feel and being very clear with that and being able to say that out loud like look, I can't even imagine the things you've gone through an experience and how tough that might be to deal with. So I think it's like saying that out loud, putting that on the table and then working to build the relationship of like, I can't imagine what this is like, but when you're here in these walls, I'm on your team. And one thing I would highly recommend trying to avoid is like minimizing the pain or the challenge that they're going through. Like Oh, it's going to be okay. Like we can't say that Renee Brown talks about this a lot. It's like we want to avoid the word at least it could be worse. Or we want to like avoid like minimizing what the people are going through because if they're feeling pain it is real. And especially from the sounds of this question, it's like this is the real deal. So we can't minimize that. We can't say it's going to necessarily be better in a short amount of time, but it's, I can't imagine how you're feeling when you're here. I'm on your team. Yeah. And you can do all of that without having gone through the exact experience that someone else has gone through. And anytime you want to talk, I'm here and I'm here to listen and I'm, there's nothing magic that I can say to you that's going to solve all these problems, but I'm on your team. That's where I would start. Elizabeth Gilbert has a great piece, um, on our Facebook about this. I'm going to try to dig that up and we'll have jack put that in the links as well. That might help. Again, I don't think there's a magic formula. It's just finding ways to display real empathy and helping people know that you're on, you're on their team. Right. That's where I had showing that you're there for them. Yeah. Next question.
Speaker 4:I'm curious about being in the Midwest and populated as it is. Is it harder to get benefits out of being an athlete and such a small state when there's so little competition, what kinds of things can you do to get those higher levels of competition to prepare you for the next level? Maybe high school or in Colorado might have a much better chance of having a better overall and warrior on the game. Then someone from Wyoming,
Speaker 1:this one is tough and I've thought a lot about this like okay, growing up in a smaller community and then trying to make a big leap to play at a big school, it's tough. Um, I think there's upsides and downsides. Downside is if you play in a smaller community, like in Wyoming, even just like the Midwest, somewhere in there, they're everywhere. It's like we cap out on finding people that are better than us to play against. And so we sort of peak when we're like ninth and 10th graders cause that's when like we kind of hit our capacity of finding people that can push it to the next. And so like we get really good when we were young and then we kind of run out of people that can beat us. If you live in a bigger city, it's not hard to find people better than you to go play against because that helps a lot. And so that's the kind of challenge playing in a smaller place. Now obviously ways around that are like we can travel, we can find better competition, may be older people, maybe there's a community college or even small college that you could go play against their players. So there's ways to get creative. Now this isn't to say that it's all bad. I truly believe like playing sports in a smaller community is like a really special thing. Um, a lot of people from bigger cities, they don't know what it's like to have like the whole town in this stance. Like everyone there and like it's, it's such a special like event for the community. When there's a game, everyone shows out. Like that's pretty cool thing. And even the connections within the state. It's like, especially in Wyoming, it's like everyone kind of knows everyone. When you go to the state tournament, you like make friends from different towns and it's connected in bigger states. It's like the chances of you even making it to the state tournament, slim to none. You don't get that experience. So it's like there's some special experiences you get playing in a smaller town. Now it might be harder to get that level of competition that's going to make you be like the best player you can be to make that leap. But I just think the value of it, the experience is pretty cool. So I'd appreciate that. And if you do have those big dreams, there's way, there's ways to get creative Finegold competition. You might have to do a little traveling, you think out of the box, but it can be done. Thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next pod.
