Improve learning by utilizing Desirable Difficulty
For those who listened to Episode 79 of the podcast where we discuss Ecological Approach to Skill Acquisition. I briefly talked about the concept of Desirable Difficulty. I highly recommend checking out Dr. Benjamin Keep’s video explaining the concept here. For something that is more related to motor learning I would recommend looking into the Challenge Point Hypothesis. Rob Gray goes into it here. The research done on Challenge Point Hypothesis seems to be more mixed compared to Desirable Difficulty. Nevertheless this is a concept I have been utilizing in my classes over the last couple of years. For those who are subscribed to the free (even though it says paid) Substack, this concept is what I base my ukemi instruction on.
To summarize and simplify the important points I use to direct my classes.
Differentiate between a learning environment and a performance environment
There is an optimal difficulty where learning occurs
Optimal challenge point for learning is not the optimal one for immediate performance in practice.
If it’s too easy the student will get bored and/or not be getting new information for learning.
If it’s too difficult they may get frustrated and/or be overloaded with information making learning either difficult or impossible.
What does this mean? It means practice should be messy looking. If it’s not, then its very likely that learning is not occuring and you need to increase difficulty through adjusting the variability or complexity of the task. Many instructors have this obsession with having practice look a certain way, over correcting every single mistake the student makes (which mistakes to correct can be it’s whole other post), or have the student be able to do a certain thing by the end of class. On the other hand, if the student is constantly failing at the task, then you might have to lower the difficulty, or redirect their focus of attention with verbal cues. This does not mean to use Task Decomposition.
Just because someone isn’t able to do something in the short term it doesn’t mean that you need to correct them, or simplify the task. This is where individual coaches experiences and observation skills come into play and will just have to experiment. There is no set recipe or formula. But a good sign that something is too hard is if after a few classes, everyone is still struggling to complete the task goal.
From experimenting I chose to target the class’s overall success rate to be between 40%-70% in accomplishing the task goal. For more risky tasks such as certain throws with beginners I would aim for 90% or more.
Learning doesn’t have to be easy, fun, or difficult. But it has to at the very least be stimulating.