Undesirable difficulty effects in the learning of high-element interactivity materials
journal contribution
posted on 2020-03-31, 12:50 authored by Ouhao Chen, JC Castro-Alonso, F Paas, J Sweller© 2018 Chen, Castro-Alonso, Paas and Sweller. According to the concept of desirable difficulties, introducing difficulties in learning may sacrifice short-term performance in order to benefit long-term retention of learning. We describe three types of desirable difficulty effects: testing, generation, and varied conditions of practice. The empirical literature indicates that desirable difficulty effects are not always obtained and we suggest that cognitive load theory may be used to explain many of these contradictory results. Many failures to obtain desirable difficulty effects may occur under conditions where working memory is already stressed due to the use of high element interactivity information. Under such conditions, the introduction of additional difficulties may be undesirable rather than desirable. Empirical evidence from diverse experiments is used to support this hypothesis.
Funding
Erasmus University Rotterdam Research Excellence Initiative 2013
PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project FB0003
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
Frontiers in PsychologyVolume
9Issue
AUGPages
(7)Publisher
Frontiers MediaVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Frontiers Media under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-07-27Publication date
2018-08-13Copyright date
2018ISSN
1664-1078eISSN
1664-1078Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Ouhao Chen Deposit date: 31 March 2020Article number
1483Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
cognitive load theoryhuman cognitive architecturedesirable difficultieselement interactivitytesting and generation effectsSocial SciencesPsychology, MultidisciplinaryPsychologyPROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLSSEMANTIC-MEMORYWORKED EXAMPLESTERM RETENTIONTESTSCOMPLEXITYRETRIEVALCLASSROOMCAPACITYCognitive Sciences
Licence
Exports
RefWorksRefWorks
BibTeXBibTeX
Ref. managerRef. manager
EndnoteEndnote
DataCiteDataCite
NLMNLM
DCDC