Month: September 2026

The misinterpretation of desirable difficulty when it comes to PKM

I became interested in what I now describe as the great keyboarding versus handwritten note-taking controversy after I had retired from my career as an educational psychologist and I could no longer conduct research. I had studied student note-taking and related topics intended to improve student performance so I had experiences that seemed relevant. As retired people do, I looked for things to do that interested me and came across a book study group reading about personal knowledge management (PKM). These folks were old school so I learned about Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten slip-based (think note card) system for storing, organizing, and applying notes over an extended period of time. The topic of whether implementations among lifelong learners such as the members of this group should use handwritten notes stored or modernized versions of the Zettelkasten stored digitally (think Obsidian) came up frequently again raised the handwriting vs. keyboarding controversy. 

Unless they follow the research carefully, it is my impression that high school teachers and college profs are getting the message that learners are better off if they require students to take notes by hand. The issue is that learners’ attention can wander when they are online and have a device, but the most persuasive argument seems to be that learners, no matter how distractible, achieve greater understanding when taking notes by hand. I have tried to summarize the limitations of the handwriting is better argument in previous posts. 

The desirability difficulty hypothesis

Why would this be the case? The most common explanation is based in the observation that students can record more information when using a keyboard because a keyboard tends to be faster than handwriting. On the surface, this difference might seem to advantage students who take notes on a tablet or laptop, as students who enter information faster would seem better able to keep up with a lecturer. 

The desirable difficulty hypothesis is used to reach a different conclusion (Bork and Bork, 2011. Desirable difficulty is a learning condition that makes practice feel more effortful and often makes performance look worse in the moment, but improves long-term retention and transfer. It can apply in many areas (e.g., do you highlight or take notes when you read), but here is based on the proposal that the slower rate of handwritten notes in the context of the demanding rate of information presentation in a lecture forces students to make decisions about what they will get down on paper. They argue that students focus on the most important information and rework the auditory input in their own words. When writing about another of my personal interests, I would describe this as a generative rather than a passive process (verbatim notes). It always struck me that those who take notes using keyboards actually have more time to think rather than less and this assumes they ignore this advantage by being lazy. 

If you have read Thinking fast and slow (Kahneman) you have encountered the researcher’s distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. Fast thinking is by definition, fast and effortless and slow thinking is deliberate and effortful. Kahneman probably wouldn’t conclude that we are by nature lazy thinkers, but he does claim that the default is to cognitive behavior that is fast to conserve mental energy. We have to make a deliberate effort to override this tendency. In this situation, unless learners purposefully summarize and personalize as they take notes, the default will be to record what you can. Handwriters are forced into thinking because of the greater stress they are under. They have no choice. Perhaps keyboarders could function differently, but don’t know or don’t care.

There are options to reduce the stress (the audio recording option) and create more effective notes when working with a computer or tablet. 

As I have thought more about this I now wonder why the PKM folks use the same handwriting during lecture explanation to do the work they do. They are typically reading and, if listening to podcasts or YouTube, but have access to the pause button. Perhaps more to my issue with the desirable difficulty explanation for greater generative processing and the recommendations for the PKM folks to take their notes by hand is the lack of reasoning as to why desirable difficulty would even apply when you read. It might apply to something like highlighting versus taking notes, but given the control available to the reader, how would it relate to taking notes? If working memory was being overloaded by some combination of reading and taking notes, how would that work? You can’t do both at the same time.  I have been trying to find research studies on keyboarding versus handwriting as applied to text content, but there seems to be very, very little. 

The one study I could find (Shoen) was a graduate program thesis comparing handwritten and keyboarded notes from an “equivalent” audio and text source. The researcher made the same comment I just made about the lack of studies comparing typewritten (his term) and handwritten notes from text. The researcher found a main effect showing the advantage of “typed” notes and even an interaction showing that handwritten notes from audio produced lower retention than the other groups. This study focused on the encoding effect rather than a storage benefit, meaning the posttest was given soon after an interference task rather than after an effort to let participants consider the benefits of studying the notes. 

One related point. I am differentiating annotation of written content from taking notes. My rationale is that writing a few words in the margins which can occur when reading a book is quantitatively and qualitatively different from adding a note to text content when using a digital reading platform such as a Kindle. There are not restrictions because of space and a very different opportunity to review (search, rework. etc) notes taken digitally. 

Summary

This post focuses mainly on the desirable difficulty argument as an explanation for the superiority of handwritten notes. More specifically, I try to argue that those interested in taking notes from text or video, as is the case with most of the note-taking by PKM enthusiasts has little support from those claiming that there is research showing the benefits of handwritten notes. 

Sources

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society, 2(59-68), 56-64.

Kahneman, D., & Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Schoen, Ian, “Effects of Method and Context of Note-taking on Memory: Handwriting versus Typing in Lecture and Textbook-Reading Contexts” (2012). Pitzer Senior Theses. Paper 20. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/20

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Productive Study Behavior: Generative Learning and Retrieval Practice

I think of most of my posts as helping learners or teachers think about study behavior. I define study as what follows exposure to information, aimed at developing personal understanding and increasing the likelihood of retention and application. This perspective includes the processing experiences educators assign and the behaviors learners engage in on their own. In reality, educators tend to focus on the assignments they create and far less on what students do on their own, but this an issue I will save for another post. For those of us now operating completely on our own outside of any affiliation with a formal classroom, we study without guidance, if we make any efforts that could be described as study at all. Those providing “self-help” guidance have identified this final situation under headings such as personal knowledge management (PKM) and developing a second brain. 

My occupational efforts originally focused on preparing future teachers. Now I write for practicing teachers and individuals interested in PKM-type strategies to get more value from their reading or video consumption. I try to offer specific behaviors people can implement and an understandable version of learning theory that is valid and interpretable. I have always felt it motivating to have some notion of how what you are doing is supposed to work. The perspective that fits this practical intent is called generative learning, which, as I interpret it, encourages educators and learners to view learning activities as external actions intended to promote productive internal (cognitive) behaviors. Perhaps a different way to consider this definition is to ask if you make an assignment how do you assume the activity will create productive thinking (as good a word as any in this context) in the individual who completes the assignment? What will this activity and the related thinking accomplish? 

The Cognitive Behaviors – The Mental Tools

Cognitive processes are the active operations carried out in working memory to manipulate information. Here is my simplified description of the four basic mental tools:

  • Attend: Holding and maintaining specific ideas active in consciousness/working memory.
  • Link: Establishing connections between information units active in working memory or stored in LTM.
  • Elaborate: Generating or discovering new knowledge through the purposeful combination of active thoughts and stored memories.
  • Evaluate: Assessing whether a cognitive task or solution has been completed successfully.

Generative activities and retrieval practice are intended to influence these cognitive behaviors. 

Generative Learning Activities

Fiorella and Mayer list eight generative activities that have received most research attention. This list groups the first four as strategies that transform information into a different representation—for example, turning text into a summary, map, drawing, or mental image. The last four involve elaborating on the material through retrieval, explanation, teaching, and practice or action. The central idea is that learning improves when students actively generate meaning through an active task. 

The eight activities:

  • Summarizing
  • Mapping
  • Drawing
  • Imagining
  • Self-testing
  • Self-explaining
  • Teaching
  • Demonstrating

Recent efforts have popularized some of these activities using different labels. For example, mapping may be more familiar as concept mapping. Sketchnoting is a recent application that uses summarizing, mapping, and drawing. Taking notes might be described as summarizing, but also self-explaining. Writing to learn (writing across the curriculum) involves summarizing, explaining, and possibly teaching. 

Some of these strategies change the form of the original information. A paragraph may become a summary, a set of relationships may become a map, or a verbal explanation may become a drawing. Other strategies elaborate on the material through retrieval, explanation, teaching, or action. In both cases, the learner – not just the teacher or the technology – is doing the essential work of making meaning.

This distinction matters. Giving students polished notes, slides, or an AI-generated summary may improve access to information, but it can also bypass the productive effort through which understanding develops. The goal is therefore not merely to provide better representations. It is to have students create, evaluate, and revise their own representations.

Sometimes you can use your own behavior to imagine a distinction between optional behaviors – I could do this or I could do that. Which is most generative? For example, I could highlight text I think is important as I read a book, or I could take notes from that book in my notebook. Both are external tasks, but what mental behaviors are involved?  Researchers often contrast allowing students to look over (reread) learning materials versus various generative strategies – writing a summary, writing questions to be used later, listing personal examples that fit with the information to be learned. 

Examples aside, I think it is valuable for educators to consider how the assignments they require or the study techniques students use encourage linking, elaboration, and evaluation. My own organization of external activities would look a little different, isolating self-testing (which I think is better described as retrieval practice) from other generative activities, but those preferences reflect how I think I can best offer a meaningful explanation to practitioners. The following section explains why.

Retrieval Practice

Yes, self-testing is included on the list of generative activities. I included it because Fiorella and Mayers did. Retrieval practice is a learning technique based on the idea that actively pulling information from memory strengthens it. The classic study making this argument involves a treatment and control condition. Both groups are exposed to new information. The control is allowed a specific amount of time to read (if text) and review this content. The treatment or retrieval practice, group is given less time to read and review, and this reduction in time is filled with closed-book questions. After a delay, the retrieval practice group, the group having shorter access to the learning and study content, demonstrates superior retention. 

Retrieval practice may be a new term for you, but if you have created flashcards and then used these cards to prepare for an approaching examination, you already have engaged in retrieval practice. You practice without access to the original content (closed book). You try to remember and you typically can flip the card over after a failed effort at retrieval to check on what you could not remember. Retrieval practice has some surprising properties, including that it seems to be helpful even when retrieval fails. 

Why is struggling to retrieve helpful? I have my own explanation based on a common memory experience. What do you do when struggling to remember someone’s name – say an individual you knew twenty years ago who held a specific position, such as your boss? The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon describes such situations when we cannot remember a specific thing but you feel certain if it is identified you will know what is proposed is what we were searching for. In this situation, you likely can remember other things. Can you see the person’s face? Can you remember your office and where the boss’s office was from yours? Can you remember events or stories in which you and this individual participated? What you are trying to do uses the cognitive behavior I described earlier as links. Our memories include more than items of information, but also links among these items. When we actively explore links within a short period of time, we create new connections among the items we have brought into our awareness (short-term memory) and we strengthen existing links. Future retrieval efforts will have more and stronger links to work with, helping us find what we are searching for. 

Retrieving and Understanding

Obergassel and colleagues argue that while generative tasks and retrieval tasks do not encourage completely independent mental activity, generative and retrieval tasks have unique benefits in practice and it may be useful for educators and learners to ensure that both types of activities are present in the tasks assigned to learners. Simply put, generative learning activities help learners make sense of new information, and retrieval tasks ensure consolidation (I prefer retention). In practice, learners want both benefits. If they understand something immediately, but fail to retain this understanding, what is the point? The researchers therefore explored whether a combination of tasks involving generative activity AND retrieval practice would be superior to either task alone, or to neither task. 

One observation I found helpful and perhaps meaningful to practicing educators was the difference between an open-book and a closed-book activity. The retrieval practice treatment used a cued recall task. Students studied a text explaining four concepts. To test recall, students typed a definition in response to a cue identifying one of the concepts, without access to the text. The generative treatment asked students to generate examples. So with access to their written text, a concept was presented and the student then had to offer a possible example of that concept. 

The dependent variables in this research were retention and comprehension questions administered immediately after the study phase and after a one-week delay. The retention questions required the learners to write a definition of the four concepts covered in the study materials. The comprehension task included items in which a scenario was presented and the students were asked to create an example based on one of the concepts that fit that scenario. The other items provided examples and asked which concept fit the example. 

The generative treatment, the retrievable practice group, and the treatment group receiving both all performed better than the rereading-only group. The group receiving both generative and retrieval practice tasks outperformed all other groups. When comparing the generative and retrieval practice groups. The generative group demonstrated an advantage on the immediate posttest when retrieval would have been easier.

The researchers concluded that retrieval practice and generative tasks overlap, but offer sufficiently distinct benefits that educators should provide students with both types of experience. 

Boundary Conditions

Understanding options for generative and formative testing is important. Activities should suit the learning task. The “generative examples of” and “write a summary of” activities were well suited to the materials in the experiment I have just described but would not be suited say to a biochemistry class in which students were studying the Krebs Cycle. In that case, drawing and annotating a diagram of the cycle would make much more sense as a study technique.

Any external activity also costs time and mental effort. There is certainly such a thing as what students might describe as “busy work” when a specific task is inefficient. Again, consider the time required to make flashcards. This strategy seems efficient when appropriate to certain learning goals because there is benefit both in formulating the questions and easy use of the cards. The time to create and to use is minimal. This is an issue I have wondered about when it comes to a tactic such as Sketchnoting. Investing too much time in intricate artwork would be a trap that might catch some students.

Conclusion

Generative learning tasks and retrieval practice offer overlapping benefits impacting both understanding and long-term memory access. New research demonstrates that there are enough unique benefits it is worth students applying both as study strategies.

Resources

Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. (2016). Eight Ways to Promote Generative Learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717-741.

Obergassel, N., Renkl, A., Endres, T., Nückles, M., Carpenter, S. K., & Roelle, J. (2025). Combining generative tasks and retrieval tasks. Journal of Educational Psychology, 117(6), 980–997. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000949

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