Teachers and students often interpret their struggle with content as a sign that something isn’t working. Maybe the directions weren’t clear enough, the task was too complex, or the scaffolds were insufficient. Yet, from a cognitive science perspective, moments of effort and uncertainty are not warning signs but essential ingredients of learning. Research on desirable difficulties and productive failure shows that students learn more deeply when they wrestle with challenging problems, provided those challenges remain within their reach.

Why Productive Struggle Matters

When learners engage in desirable difficulties, they develop both cognitive and emotional resilience. They begin to associate effort with progress rather than frustration. This shift builds academic tenacity and agency, fostering the belief that I can figure this out.

As the Bjorks remind us, “conditions that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create difficulties can enhance both” (Bjork & Bjork, 2011). The short-term struggle is the investment that makes learning last.

From Effort to Learning

Cognitive engagement thrives when thinking feels effortful. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork (1994) coined the term desirable difficulties to describe the kinds of obstacles that make learning slower in the moment but more durable over time. When learners must retrieve, generate, or reorganize information rather than simply recognize or repeat it, they activate the deeper processing that strengthens memory and transfer.

As Manu Kapur (2008) notes in his work on productive failure, a process that follows the structure of Attempt → Struggle → Learn (through instruction) → Consolidate, having early struggle encourages learners to explore multiple strategies and encounter misconceptions before receiving direct instruction. This early exploration primes the learner’s brain to integrate new information more meaningfully. The early struggle can illuminate the gap in the learner's knowledge. Knowing there is a gap is what motivates one to expend the energy to gather knowledge and fill it. When instruction follows the initial exploration and challenge, students are better prepared to understand why the correct methods work, and their explanations become much more meaningful. Students now see why the correct method works, because they can contrast it with their own imperfect attempts. The sequence of struggle first, then clarity, is cognitively efficient and emotionally satisfying. Students feel ownership and instruction feels purposeful rather than imposed.

The paradox of learning is that what feels easy rarely lasts, while what feels hard endures. When students struggle to retrieve foundational knowledge, they often assume their study method is ineffective. The opposite is true. Effortful retrieval strengthens memory and deepens understanding. Practices like self-quizzing or testing are far more powerful than passively rereading notes or highlights. Skimming creates a comforting illusion of knowing because recognition feels easy, but it does not build retrieval strength. True cognitive engagement peaks at the point of mental effort. This is when learners operate just beyond their challenge-readiness zone and receive feedback that helps them stay oriented toward success.

What Teachers Can (and Can’t) See

Productive struggle can look messy. Students may hesitate, debate, or make repeated attempts before reaching clarity. To the observer, it may resemble confusion, but inside the learner’s mind, neural pathways are firing as they connect, retrieve, and refine.

The teacher’s role is not to remove the struggle but to design for it. This structure requires one to calibrate challenge, provide strategic feedback, and maintain emotional safety. A classroom built for cognitive engagement normalizes error as part of the thinking process. Learners come to see difficulty not as a signal of inability, but as evidence that their brains are growing.

Teachers can monitor productive struggle by listening for the language of reasoning, noticing persistence in the face of challenge, and celebrating strategy use rather than speed or correctness. These are the visible signs that desirable difficulty is doing its job.

Designing for Productive Struggle

To create these optimal conditions for cognitive engagement:

• Pose problems before explanations.
• Let students attempt a task before you model the solution. Their initial attempts prime their brains to absorb feedback and explanation more effectively. Let them struggle, then give them a proficiency scale and ask which foundational knowledge bullets at level 2.0 they need to know to be successful. Make sure you are ready to let them research the foundational aspects they need to close that gap in understanding.
• Interleave and space your practice.   
• Mix problem types, change contexts, or introduce spacing between tasks to require knowledge retrieval and reorganization.
• Respond to error with curiosity.
• Replace correction with exploration: “Why do you think this happened?” or “What might make this work?”
• Model persistence.
• Show your own process of grappling with uncertainty. When teachers demonstrate how to think through a challenge, they make perseverance visible.

These strategies transform struggle into cognitive engagement. Students are not merely busy. They are actively constructing understanding. We will have specific examples in next week’s “Use-It-Tomorrow” blog. So make sure to sign up to receive the blogs.

In Summary

Learning that feels hard is often learning that sticks. Productive struggle isn’t a flaw in instruction. It is a feature of deep thinking. When teachers design lessons that invite effortful cognitive engagement and the appropriate level of challenge, and make not knowing the norm, they cultivate classrooms where engagement is not just visible; it’s intellectual.

If you are interested in exploring more about productive struggle and other principles of cognitive engagement, join the Learning Hub and post in the Community Channels, register to attend an office hour, or send a direct message to the Learning Hub Faculty.

References

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society, 2, 56–64.

Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379–424.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? Jossey-Bass.