Do You Learn More by Struggling on Hard Problems? - Scott H Young

It’s abundantly clear that both practice and instruction are necessary for effective learning. Advocates of Direct Instruction make ample room for practice after seeing examples. Studies that support a problem-first approach still require that the student is eventually shown the correct answer.

Thus, we can immediately rule out extremes. Pure discovery learning, where students are never shown instructions or examples, fails miserably.

Regardless of the optimal procedure—either see an example, then do practice, or attempt a solution, then see the example—both ingredients are necessary.

Early on, struggle may help you get a sense of the problem, but you’re unlikely to arrive at the best answer spontaneously. In that case, difficulty can become undesirable. Even if you can figure out how to solve a problem, you may still benefit from seeing an example. Work in cognitive load theory suggests that studying the “correct” example is beneficial because it helps you learn the general pattern for solving that type of problem.

Later, as the material gets more manageable and you become more comfortable with it, there are increasing benefits to learning by problem solving. 

There are two distinct points of difficulty in learning:

Failures of instruction. When instruction is omitted or insufficient, students struggle.

Failures of initiative. Without active engagement by the student, lessons may be wasted.

For learning to happen, there must be a sufficient supply of knowledge to make successfully acquiring skills possible. At the same time, if there’s no demand to use that knowledge learning is often superficial.

Problems of knowledge demand come when you consume information and never use it. Collecting cookbooks instead of making meals. Buying a phrase book rather than speaking a language. Watching videos on YouTube instead of doing the real thing.

The best thing you can do to improve your learning is to have all three ingredients: instruction, practice, and feedback. If you’re lacking one of these, ask yourself how you might seek it out and structure it into your efforts to get better. Only when you have access to all three does it make sense to fine-tune the sequence.