Paul A. Kirschner
As I wrote in a previous piece, Robert and Elizabeth Bjork once identified five desirable difficulties. Three of them have since become educational darlings: spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval practice. They appear in books, professional development sessions, and policy documents. The remaining two have been far less fortunate. Contextual interference and reduced feedback rarely receive the same attention. Perhaps because they are harder to explain. Perhaps because they run counter to what feels like good teaching (whatever that is). My last piece was about reduced feedback. This one is about the other: contextual interference, a desirable difficulty that is quietly powerful and consistently overlooked.
AUTHOR
Paul A. Kirschner, dr.h.c. is Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the Open University of the Netherlands and Guest Professor at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (Mechelen, Belgium. He holds an honorary doctorate at Oulu University (Finland) and is Research Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society for the Learning Sciences. and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He is a former member of the Dutch Educational Council.