Robert Bjork

Who they are

According to the website of the UCLA Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab, Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork arrived at UCLA in 1974. The lab describes its work as studying how people learn, versus how they think they learn, with a focus on improving educational practices and self-regulated learning, and a stated aim of bridging the gap between cognitive theory and real-world educational applications. It says the lab has supported 120 students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting researchers.

That is as much of a biography as the sources checked for this page support. Dates of degrees, titles, honours and the full publication record have not been verified here, and this page does not state them.

Key papers

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475-479. A commentary that closes a special issue on desirable difficulties. It reviews the history of the idea, including the New Theory of Disuse and the distinction between storage strength and retrieval strength, and responds to papers on law school instruction, mathematics spacing, study-skills programmes, children's spacing, motor learning and motivation. It credits the term desirable difficulty to Robert Bjork's single-authored chapters of 1994.

Bjork, R. A., & Yue, C. L. (2016). "Commentary: Is disfluency desirable?" Metacognition and Learning, 11(1), 133-137. A commentary on a set of studies of perceptual disfluency. It reports that the six studies generally failed to find the benefits of harder fonts reported by Diemand-Yauman and colleagues in 2011: three experiments by Rummer and colleagues found no effect, Eitel and Kuhl found none on retention or transfer, and two experiments by Sidi and colleagues found that a disfluent font helped on computers and hurt on paper.

Key ideas

Desirable difficulties. Challenges that trigger encoding and retrieval processes and so support learning, comprehension and remembering. The 2020 paper adds the condition that they become undesirable when the learner lacks the background knowledge or skill to meet them. See Desirable Difficulties.

Apparent learning is a poor guide to real learning. The 2020 commentary says conditions that speed up apparent performance often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, and conditions that slow apparent learning often work better. It adds that learners and teachers can misjudge whether learning has occurred, and that massed practice can create an illusion of mastery.

The limits of knowing. The authors say they once assumed that showing learners the research would be enough, and now see motivation as a major obstacle to applying it.

Forms the idea has taken. The 2020 commentary lists spacing and interleaving, testing as retrieval practice, generation, pretesting, learning from errors and adaptive schedules of difficulty. Each changes what the learner has to do. Retrieval triggered by testing, for example, can strengthen later recall, reduce intrusions from incorrect information and give learners feedback on what they have not yet learned, and generation is generally desirable provided learners have the prior learning to succeed.

Fonts are not on that list. The 2020 text does not mention fonts or disfluency, and the 2016 commentary on the font studies is where the two literatures meet. It summarises six studies that generally failed to find the learning benefits reported for hard-to-read fonts in 2011.

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