An Evaluation of Desirable Difficulties: Examining the Contributions of Metacognitive Monitoring and Emotional Cost

• In Event: Using the Concept of Perceived Cost to Bridge Cognitive and Motivational Theories of Student Learning

Abstract

Purpose and Framework: Desirable difficulties refer to strategies that make learning more challenging but result in better, long-term knowledge retention. The underlying theory of desirable difficulties posits that these strategies are desirable because they lead to more robust knowledge, but they are also difficult as they make learning feel more challenging (Bjork, 1994). Examples of strategies that create desirable difficulties include retrieval practice, spaced practice, and interleaved practice. Although they have nuances, each of these strategies requires learners to retrieve and apply information to different situations and contexts. That is, they require learners to employ metacognitive monitoring to keep track of what they do and do not understand. Simultaneously, they create challenges by making studying feel more emotionally draining (e.g., the emotional costs of studying). However, prior work has not evaluated how these two mechanisms of desirable difficulties contribute to one’s learning experiences. Therefore, we seek to evaluate whether and how metacognitive monitoring and emotional costs of studying contribute to students’ experiences when preparing for an exam and their exam outcomes. Based on the theory of desirable difficulties, we hypothesized: 1) If students keep track of what they do and do not understand, it can highlight uncertainties that can present themselves as an emotional cost of studying, suggesting monitoring and emotional costs of studying would be positively related. 2) Engaging in monitoring should increase understanding of the content, resulting in higher exam scores and increased confidence in their exam accuracy. 3) Similarly, the more students struggle with understanding the content thereby find studying draining, the less confident they would be about how well they knew information on the exam, suggesting a negative association between emotional cost and confidence in their exam accuracy.

Method: To test these hypotheses, students from a private southern University participated in this study as part of their regular class activities. Students answered Likert-scale questions to assess their metacognitive monitoring and emotional cost from previously validated scales (Authors, 2022 and Beymer et al., 2022, respectively) after each exam for three consecutive exams. This resulting in 146 observations over two semesters across 50 students. During the exams, students also rated their confidence judgments after each exam question, and exam scores were collected.

Results: We used three multilevel models to include the random effects of student and exam/time. These models revealed that monitoring and emotional cost were positively related but differentially contributed to students’ exam experiences (see Table 1). Monitoring was positively associated with exam performance but not with their confidence judgments, whereas emotional cost was negatively associated with confidence judgments and not exam performance.

Significance: These results suggest that monitoring and emotional cost uniquely influence students’ studying experiences and provide support that these are two mechanisms of desirable difficulties. This work also informs interventions aimed at increasing students' use of strategies that produce desirable difficulties. Future efforts should focus on boosting students’ metacognitive monitoring abilities and reducing their perceived emotional costs of studying rather than effort and time costs which have been ineffective (e.g., Wang et al., 2023).

Authors

• Cristina D. Zepeda, Vanderbilt University

• Alexis Richmond, University of Texas at Austin