What caught my eye was not the distinction between performance and learning, but the condition that difficulty must result in success.
It raises another question: under what conditions?
The same retrieval task can create productive struggle for one learner and become overwhelming for another, or even for the same learner under different levels of cognitive load. The difficult part seems to be the calibration: when does desirable difficulty become simply too difficult?
I think it’s pretty straightforward- difficultly stops being desirable if it results in failure. So, if students are struggling too much, we need to restore some of the scaffolding needed for them to remain successful.
Your article asks how we know that learning has happened. My question was directed more at the conditions under which we define the outcome of learning, rather than how we respond to it.
I would politely disagree that adjusting scaffolding is quite so straightforward. Failure is already an outcome. Adjusting scaffolding after that outcome is certainly valid, but identifying the need for adjustment during the learning process is less straightforward.
Your response was: “If students are struggling too much, we need to restore some of the scaffolding.” But this brings me back to my original question: under what conditions is “too much” determined, and who defines the level of difficulty?
To me, this seems like a question that deserves further research, or perhaps another article.
Thank you, David, for this article!
What caught my eye was not the distinction between performance and learning, but the condition that difficulty must result in success.
It raises another question: under what conditions?
The same retrieval task can create productive struggle for one learner and become overwhelming for another, or even for the same learner under different levels of cognitive load. The difficult part seems to be the calibration: when does desirable difficulty become simply too difficult?
I think it’s pretty straightforward- difficultly stops being desirable if it results in failure. So, if students are struggling too much, we need to restore some of the scaffolding needed for them to remain successful.
Your article asks how we know that learning has happened. My question was directed more at the conditions under which we define the outcome of learning, rather than how we respond to it.
I would politely disagree that adjusting scaffolding is quite so straightforward. Failure is already an outcome. Adjusting scaffolding after that outcome is certainly valid, but identifying the need for adjustment during the learning process is less straightforward.
Your response was: “If students are struggling too much, we need to restore some of the scaffolding.” But this brings me back to my original question: under what conditions is “too much” determined, and who defines the level of difficulty?
To me, this seems like a question that deserves further research, or perhaps another article.
Ok. Fair - I’ll give some thought to a follow up piece explaining how I think this plays out.
Thanks. Scaffolding of learning is often proposed but rarely defined in domain terms, or teased out.