from RANGE:
“Being forced to generate answers improves subsequent learning even if the generated answer is wrong. It can even help to be wildly wrong.”
“One of those desirable difficulties is known as the “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. Socrates was apparently on to something when he forced pupils to generate answers rather than bestowing them. It requires the learner to intentionally sacrifice current performance for future benefit.”
“the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term. Excessive hint-giving, like in the eighth-grade math classroom, does the opposite; it bolsters immediate performance, but undermines progress in the long run. Several desirable difficulties that can be used in the classroom are among the most rigorously supported methods of enhancing learning, and the engaging eighth-grade math teacher accidentally subverted all of them in the well-intended interest of before-your-eyes progress.”
“When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, Richland told me, “parents are like, ‘Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way.’” If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.”
“when the students were playing multiple choice with the teacher, “what they’re actually doing is seeking rules.” They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute. “We’re very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to in order to accomplish a task,” Richland told me. Soliciting hints toward a solution is both clever and expedient. The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire.”
In the United States, about one-fifth of questions posed to students began as making-connections problems. But by the time the students were done soliciting hints from the teacher and solving the problems, a grand total of zero percent remained making-connections problems. Making-connections problems did not survive the teacher-student interactions. Rather than letting students grapple with some confusion, teachers often responded to their solicitations with hint-giving that morphed a making-connections problem into a using-procedures one.