Conditions that make learning feel harder tend to make it last longer — fluency is a misleading signal.
Bjork’s term, and the reason the most popular study methods are popular — rereading and highlighting optimise the feeling of learning, which is a different variable from learning.
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supports →Producing your own sentence about an idea encodes durably; recognising someone else’s does almost nothing.Explains why generation works when recognition does not: the effort of producing an answer is the encoding, so removing the difficulty removes the benefit.
← has exampleA failed retrieval attempt followed by feedback beats spending the same time reading.
The most counterintuitive instance of the principle, and the cleanest: the failure is not a cost paid before learning, it is the mechanism.