Teaching With Desirable Difficulty: Promoting Student Success Through the Practice of Productive Struggle
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Start Date
8-16-2023 3:55 PM
Description
In many fields of advanced study, especially in STEM, mastering the relevant hands-on skills and techniques requires patience, trial and error, and persistence. Undergraduate students aren’t often prepared for this level of struggle and may not have experienced repeated failures along their road to success. By imbuing a course’s content with the pedagogical concepts of productive struggle and desirable difficulty, the instructor becomes a guide to improve student retention and grit by teaching students 1) how to handle large, complex intellectual challenges with maturity, 2) how to create effective strategies to break large problems into approachable segments, and 3) how to use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with frustration.
We have recently used this approach in a new Neurophysiology Laboratory course in the Biology Department. We designed the course to teach undergraduates many of the techniques used by neuroscience research professionals. We wanted to evaluate whether teaching the concepts productive struggle and desirable difficulty improved our students’ self-ratings of their own coping skills, compared to students enrolled in a different upper-level physiology laboratory course (Organismal Physiology). We received IRB approval to use a published, validated Coping Self-Efficacy Scale (Chesney et al. 2006) to measure student ratings before and after completing either of these physiology lab courses.
Participation in our Neurophysiology course significantly improved students’ ratings of coping self-efficacy, while students enrolled in Organismal Physiology showed no change. Interestingly, our students’ overall improvement was driven by problem-focused coping strategies and not emotion-focused coping or social support. This empirical data supports the benefit to students of using desirable difficulties when teaching particularly challenging advanced content or skill-based courses.
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Teaching With Desirable Difficulty: Promoting Student Success Through the Practice of Productive Struggle
In many fields of advanced study, especially in STEM, mastering the relevant hands-on skills and techniques requires patience, trial and error, and persistence. Undergraduate students aren’t often prepared for this level of struggle and may not have experienced repeated failures along their road to success. By imbuing a course’s content with the pedagogical concepts of productive struggle and desirable difficulty, the instructor becomes a guide to improve student retention and grit by teaching students 1) how to handle large, complex intellectual challenges with maturity, 2) how to create effective strategies to break large problems into approachable segments, and 3) how to use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with frustration.
We have recently used this approach in a new Neurophysiology Laboratory course in the Biology Department. We designed the course to teach undergraduates many of the techniques used by neuroscience research professionals. We wanted to evaluate whether teaching the concepts productive struggle and desirable difficulty improved our students’ self-ratings of their own coping skills, compared to students enrolled in a different upper-level physiology laboratory course (Organismal Physiology). We received IRB approval to use a published, validated Coping Self-Efficacy Scale (Chesney et al. 2006) to measure student ratings before and after completing either of these physiology lab courses.
Participation in our Neurophysiology course significantly improved students’ ratings of coping self-efficacy, while students enrolled in Organismal Physiology showed no change. Interestingly, our students’ overall improvement was driven by problem-focused coping strategies and not emotion-focused coping or social support. This empirical data supports the benefit to students of using desirable difficulties when teaching particularly challenging advanced content or skill-based courses.