What category does Desirable Difficulties belong to?

Desirable Difficulties belongs to the "Concepts" category in personal knowledge management and productivity.

What are the key topics related to Desirable Difficulties?

Key topics related to Desirable Difficulties include: education, knowledge-management, learning, psychology, techniques.

What are alternative names for Desirable Difficulties?

Desirable Difficulties is also known as: Productive struggle.

Desirable Difficulties

Learning challenges that slow initial performance but enhance long-term retention.

Also known as: Productive struggle

Category: Concepts

Tags: education, knowledge-management, learning, psychology, techniques

Explanation

Desirable Difficulties are learning conditions that make initial learning harder but ultimately enhance long-term retention and transfer. Examples include: testing yourself instead of re-reading (active recall), spacing practice over time (spaced repetition), mixing topics (interleaving), and generating answers rather than reading them (generation effect). These difficulties feel harder in the moment but produce superior learning. Easy learning often means shallow learning.

Related Concepts

Active Recall
Generation Effect
Interleaving
Spaced Repetition

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