Chapter 12 Exercises: Practicing Desirable Difficulties

These exercises require you to deliberately introduce productive challenge into your learning. They will feel uncomfortable in specific ways — that's the point. Do them with real material from your current studies.

Exercise 1: The Pre-Test Experiment

Time required: 15–20 minutes before studying; reflection afterward Materials: The next chapter or section you plan to study

This exercise applies the pre-testing effect directly to your own learning.

Step 1: Identify your next planned study session — the chapter or section you're about to tackle.

Step 2: Before reading or reviewing anything, spend 10–12 minutes answering these questions in writing about the upcoming material: - What do I already think I know about this topic? - What do I expect this material to cover? - What questions do I think it will answer? - What's my current best guess at the main claims or concepts? - What parts of this topic am I most confused about?

Write actual answers. Even if you have very little prior knowledge, write your best guesses.

Step 3: Study the material as you normally would.

Step 4: After studying, return to your pre-test answers. For each one: - Mark what was correct, approximately correct, and wrong - Note what you missed entirely — things you didn't expect - Note what surprised you or contradicted your predictions

Reflection: - Did the content you "predicted wrong" feel more salient during reading? - Which parts of the material stuck best — the parts that confirmed your predictions or the parts that corrected them? - How did this differ from reading without any prior attempt?

Repeat this for three consecutive study sessions and track whether the technique seems to affect your retention.

Exercise 2: The Generation Game

Time required: 30 minutes Materials: A set of notes from a recent lecture or reading

This exercise tests the generation effect in your own learning.

Group A condition (what you'll do):

Take your notes from a recent session. Cover everything except the section headings or topic names. For each topic, try to generate the key information — write it out from memory before uncovering the notes. Work through every section this way.

Group B condition (what you would have done):

Reread the notes. This is the comparison condition. You're not going to do this — you're going to generate instead.

After completing your generation pass:

Uncover your notes and compare. For each section: - What did you generate correctly? - What was wrong but close? - What did you miss entirely?

Circle your misses. These are your highest-priority review items — not because you should reread them, but because you should generate them again tomorrow, with one day of spacing.

Reflection: - How did generating feel compared to rereading? - Where were the biggest gaps between what you thought you knew and what was actually in your notes? - Did generating an answer that turned out to be wrong feel different from generating a correct one? How?

Exercise 3: The Difficulty Calibration Inventory

Time required: 20–30 minutes Materials: Your current learning materials across all subjects/projects

This exercise asks you to honestly assess where you are on the difficulty spectrum in each of your current learning areas.

Step 1: List all the things you're currently learning or studying — subjects, skills, projects.

Step 2: For each item, rate the current difficulty of your practice on a 1–10 scale: - 1–3: Too easy. You're rarely getting things wrong. Sessions feel smooth and comfortable. - 4–6: In the zone. You're challenged, sometimes struggling, but making progress. - 7–9: Too hard. You're confused more than you're struggling productively. Forward motion is rare. - 10: Completely blocked. No traction whatsoever.

Step 3: For each item, identify what adjustment would move it toward the 4–6 zone: - If it's too easy (1–3): What harder material, less support, or more varied challenge could you introduce? - If it's too hard (7–9): What prerequisite do you need to build first? What simpler version of this task could you master before returning to the full complexity?

Step 4: Make one concrete change per learning area based on this analysis.

Reflection: - Were any of your ratings surprising? Were you in a comfortable zone you thought was challenging? - What's the single biggest adjustment you can make to keep yourself in the productive zone?

Exercise 4: Variation Session Design

Time required: 30–45 minutes Materials: Your current learning practice

Most people practice the same material in the same format. This exercise forces variation.

Step 1: Identify one skill or domain you've been practicing consistently — ideally something where you've been doing the same type of practice repeatedly.

Step 2: List five ways to vary your next five practice sessions: - Different problem type (not just the usual format) - Different context (apply the concept to a different domain) - Different medium (if you normally write, speak; if you normally type, draw) - Different difficulty (deliberately harder or more varied than usual) - Different sequence (shuffle the order rather than following the textbook structure)

Step 3: Run three of those five varied sessions over the next week.

Step 4: After the three sessions, attempt the same kind of assessment you'd normally use to measure your learning in this domain. How did performance compare to your baseline?

Reflection: - Did the varied sessions feel harder? Which types of variation were most challenging? - On the post-practice assessment, did any of the varied approaches seem to produce better transfer? - What did variation reveal about the limits of your current understanding?

Exercise 5: The Desirable vs. Undesirable Difficulty Audit

Time required: 20–25 minutes Materials: Journal

This exercise builds the meta-skill of distinguishing productive difficulty from unproductive difficulty in your own experience.

Step 1: Think back to your last 5–7 study sessions. For each one, answer: - On a scale of 1–10, how hard did it feel? - On a scale of 1–10, how productive did it feel in the moment? - Looking back now, how much did you actually retain from that session?

Step 2: For any session where difficulty was high (7+), classify the difficulty as: - Desirable: Hard because you were generating, retrieving, struggling with content at your edge - Undesirable: Hard because you were confused, missing prerequisites, overwhelmed, or unable to progress

Step 3: For any sessions where the difficulty felt low but actual retention was also low, identify: was this the fluency illusion? What would have made that session productively harder?

Reflection: - What pattern do you notice between session difficulty type (desirable vs. undesirable) and actual retention? - Which of your current learning activities are in each category? - What one change would introduce more desirable difficulty into your regular practice?

Exercise 6: The Generate-Wrong-Answer Protocol

Time required: 20 minutes per topic Materials: Any new topic you're about to learn

This exercise deliberately applies the pre-testing effect's most counterintuitive finding: generating wrong answers before learning still helps.

Step 1: Choose a specific concept you're about to learn. It should be something you genuinely don't know yet — not something you're reviewing, but truly new material.

Step 2: Without any reference materials, spend 5–8 minutes writing down: - Your best guess at what this concept means - An explanation of it as if you were teaching it to someone - A possible example of it in action - Why you think it matters

Your answers will likely be wrong or incomplete. That's fine. That's actually the point.

Step 3: Now read or study the actual content about this concept.

Step 4: Compare what you wrote to what you just learned. Note: - Where were you right? - Where were you close but wrong? - Where were you completely off? - What aspects of the concept hadn't even occurred to you?

Reflection: - Did the parts you got wrong in your pre-generation feel more memorable after reading the correction? - What does this tell you about how to approach all new material going forward?

Exercise 7: Progressive Project — Desirable Difficulty Upgrade

Time required: 45 minutes Materials: Your Progressive Project materials

This exercise applies the chapter's principles directly to your main learning goal.

Step 1: Review your current practice routine for your Progressive Project. Be specific: what exactly are you doing in each session?

Step 2: Identify which elements of your practice are below your current zone (too easy, too smooth, too comfortable) and which might be above it (confusing, no traction, frustrated without progress).

Step 3: Design a one-week practice plan that deliberately incorporates: - At least one pre-testing session (test yourself before studying new material) - At least one generation session (recall from memory before checking) - At least two instances of variation (different format, context, or problem type than usual) - A reassessment of what is currently "just right" difficulty for you

Step 4: Run the plan for one week.

Reflection after the week: - How did the deliberately harder sessions feel compared to your usual practice? - Were any of the "harder" sessions actually undesirably difficult? What made them unproductive vs. productive? - Did your confidence in the material after the week feel different from your usual confidence?