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Organization Effect – Desirable Difficulties
The organization effect is the desirable difficulty that asks about who does the organization of the material. Teaching today usually has the teacher doing the reading for the students, organizing the material into nice little bullet-points, reading the bullet-points to the students, and finally, handing the bullet-points out to the students in…
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Disfluency Effect – Desirable Difficulties
Among the desirable difficulties that can be introduced into a classroom to enhance memorization, disfluency stands out as being particularly unintuitive. Disfluency is the process of making items to be learned more difficult to process which means that the student, in using more processing, processes the material to a deeper level. This…
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The Spacing Effect – Desirable Difficulties
The spacing Effect is a desirable difficulty for learning (along with the testing effect) that helps produce long lasting, durable memory traces, but has also been ignored in education. The spacing effect is when the learning of material takes place over long periods of time. Usually, when we teach something, we concentrate…
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Testing Effect – Desirable Difficulties
The testing effect is all about memory. If you need to have information memorized, the testing effect is said to be your most powerful tool. The testing effect is a simple to administer intervention that strengthens memory traces – in fact, some researchers specify this as being the most important, ignored finding…
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Effort in Learning
I’m disappointed to see so much effort put into making learning effortless (learning styles, cognitive-enhancing drugs, etc.). The most basic and critical component of learning is the laying down of memory traces. Making meaningful connections to the knowledge you already have. The act of taking information and going through the process of…
