Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments February 14, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
New technologies increase opportunities and pressures to learn new skills. Research on "desirable difficulties" has shown, however, that learners are often poor judges of the strategies for learning - e.g., they fail to appreciate that spacing experiences with a task out over time will enhance learning. Focusing specifically on the choice of task difficulty, we examine whether learners choose tasks of appropriate difficulty to maximize their own learning, and if not (as we find), why they fail to do so. In Study 1 (N=1,788) participants chose practice tasks that, on average, were easier than what would maximize learning. Studies 2 (N=1,913) and 3 (N=1,164), which examine whether this pattern of choice is best explained by preferences or beliefs, reveal that learners choose easier practice not because they are effort-averse, but because, on average, they hold incorrect beliefs about what level of task difficulty will maximize learning