Teaching Writing in College
Feb 14, 2023
3. "Desirable Difficulties" and ChatGPT
Tom discusses "desirable difficulties," their benefits for students, and how ChatGPT responded to an assignment with desirable difficulties factored in.
Desirable difficulties, as scholar Robert Bjork calls them, are forms of interference that teachers build into their teaching as a way to enhance student performance. They can be as simple as scrambling an outline or withholding feedback to allow students opportunities to engage in problem solving.
As a deliberate strategy for teachers, desirable difficulties are "desirable" because they place a load on student cognition that results in better long-term performance, even though they may seem less desirable because students' short-term performance may suffer.
Tom likes to write assignment prompts that provide "contextual interference," one of the strategies for incorporating desirable difficulties that Bjork recommends. Rather than outline "what the instructor wants to see" in an assignment description, a writing teacher can specify a genre and ask students to draw on strategies from class and/or their prior knowledge to make decisions about how to proceed. (And practice with different genres, Tom would argue, is one of the most important forms of knowledge development we can offer to students in writing courses.)
With proper background work (practice with a framework for analyzing genres, practice with supporting rhetorical strategies, and an analysis of several samples of the genre in which students are asked to write), an assignment that asks students to interpret and write in a given genre can support their knowledge about writing.
As it turns out, ChatGPT responded to one of Tom's prompts much the way a student might without a supporting framework for writing in different genres. In other words, it was unable to unravel the "desirable difficulties" that can foster learning.