Why Should Students Struggle in an Age of Easy Answers?

Why Should Students Struggle in an Age of Easy Answers?

Why Should Students Struggle in an Age of Easy Answers?

Price range: $39.00 through $499.00

Learn how generation, interleaving, and purposeful course design can help students retain knowledge, apply concepts, and do the thinking that AI cannot replace. 

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Description

Why Should Students Struggle in an Age of Easy Answers? 

Your students can now generate polished responses, explanations, and solutions in seconds. But a completed answer does not always mean genuine understanding.

Students may recognize familiar material, follow a practiced process, or submit polished work without building the memory, judgment, and problem-solving skills they’ll need later in advanced courses or the workplace. At the same time, activities that require more effort can prompt resistance because students often interpret difficulty as a sign that they are failing or that the assignment is unfair.

This 20-Minute Mentor will show you how to build purposeful challenge into your course without creating unnecessary confusion or frustration. You’ll learn how to use two research-informed desirable difficulty strategies—the generation effect and interleaving—to improve student retention, deepen understanding, and strengthen transfer.

Rather than focusing on AI detection or trying to eliminate generative AI from your course, this program helps you design activities that make student thinking visible. Through simple changes such as pre-questions, incomplete notes, mixed practice, case-based prompts, and AI critique activities, you can require students to retrieve, choose, explain, evaluate, and apply what they know. This program will help you make focused, manageable changes that reduce opportunities for students to outsource their thinking while helping them become more confident, capable, and independent learners. 

After viewing this Magna 20-Minute Mentor, participants will be able to: 

  • Distinguish productive struggle from unhelpful difficulty.
  • Explain how generation and interleaving strengthen learning and transfer.
  • Identify activities that create an illusion of learning.
  • Design a brief generation activity that requires students to retrieve, predict, explain, or apply.
  • Use interleaving to help students choose the appropriate strategy.
  • Revise an activity to make student reasoning visible.
  • Explain productive struggle in ways that build student buy-in.

TOPICS COVERED 

  • Distinguishing productive struggle from confusion, overload, or unnecessary difficulty
  • Explaining why fluency, recognition, and the “illusion of knowing” can feel like learning without producing understanding
  • Applying the generation effect through pre-questions, guided notes, incomplete examples, and brief exit-generation activities
  • Using interleaving to help students decide when and why to apply a method
  • Adapting desirable-difficulty strategies
  • Responding to student resistance by explaining the purpose and payoff of productive struggle
  • Using generative AI as an object of critique and analysis rather than allowing it to replace student thinking
  • Maintaining instructor presence and communicating confidence in students during challenging learning experiences

AUDIENCE

This program will benefit:

  • College and university faculty
  • Adjunct and part-time instructors
  • Teaching center and faculty development professionals
  • Instructional designers and learning experience designers
  • Department chairs and academic program leaders
  • Online, hybrid, and face-to-face instructors
  • Academic leaders purchasing faculty development resources for campus-wide use

Product Code: PM26JA

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