The Simplification Trap

These tools are in business and the product is ease, which you pay for with your attention, money and your future. You've heard the tag-lines "Study smarter, not harder." One-click summary. Upload the syllabus, get the essay. Ask, and receive the answer. Each product is competing to remove a little more friction than the last, and the market rewards whoever removes the most.

It is easy to see why. Effort is unpleasant. A tired student at eleven at night does not want to struggle; they want the thing done. Convenience demos well, breadth demos well, and a progress bar that fills itself whilst you sit back and relax is a better pitch than one you have to fill yourself.

What the promise assumes

Underneath every one of these tools is the assumption that the effort is the waste. That the struggle between you and the finished work is friction to be engineered away, like buffering on a video or a slow checkout, with the conclusion that removing the struggle means greater efficiency in learning.

But learning does not work like a checkout. The effort is not the packaging around the result. In learning, the work IS the learning. When the struggle is gone, all that's left is a feeling of productivity without a product. Then you wonder why you can't produce an answer.

Three of the most durable findings in the science of memory say this from three different angles.

• Roediger and Karpicke (2006) showed that the act of retrieving a fact from memory (not reviewing it, retrieving it) is what makes it stick, producing far stronger long-term retention than re-reading the same material.
• Slamecka and Graf (1978) named the generation effect: you remember what you produce far better than what you are handed, even when the words are identical.
• And Bjork and Bjork (2011) used findings like these to settle on the idea of desirable difficulty: that the difficulty is not an obstacle standing in front of the learning, but the mechanism of the learning itself.

These three findings show the flaws with the market's promise: Retrieval, generation, effortful production. These are exactly the things a "do it for you" tool removes.

• When it hands you the summary, it performs the generation.
• When it answers the question, it performs the retrieval.
• When it smooths away the difficulty, it smooths away the mechanism. The tool does the work, and burns away the learning that would have been yours. You can read more here on why difficulty is the point.

The comfort that costs you

Ease sells because of our innate desire to seek out comfort. And as a student or any learner in general, it's understandable why you'd seek the easy way out, after all you're most likely overwhelmed, and these tools are making the promise of reducing your struggle. But what you want isn't necessarily what you need, and may only end up backfiring, and this is one such case.

A summary produces the feeling of productivity. A finished essay produces relief. Neither produces understanding; worse, both produce a feeling that is easily mistaken for it, what is called the illusion of fluency. Then you close the app feeling like you achieved something because the work is now done, only to realise the cost during the exam, or the interview, or the first time anyone asks you to apply what you supposedly learned.

And the instinct runs deeper than study tools. It is the same logic as the endless feed and the one-tap everything.

The appropriate version of a study tool is, in one sense, the harder sell. It makes you do the work (well, in the right order, at the right difficulty) and that's what Norudit is designed to do.

If you'd like to learn more about the issues with modern study tools, check out the blog on why modern study tools fail.

Sources

• Bjork, R.A. and Bjork, E.L. (2011) 'Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning', in Gernsbacher, M.A., Pew, R.W., Hough, L.M. and Pomerantz, J.R. (eds.) Psychology and the Real World. New York: Worth Publishers, pp. 56–64.
• Roediger, H.L. and Karpicke, J.D. (2006) 'Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention', Psychological Science, 17(3), pp. 249–255.
• Slamecka, N.J. and Graf, P. (1978) 'The generation effect: delineation of a phenomenon', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), pp. 592–604.

Read more

• Why the fluent, familiar feeling of knowing something isn't actually evidence you know it: The Feeling of Knowing
• Why studying that feels easy usually isn't working, and why effortful practice sticks better: Why Difficulty Is the Point
• Why guessing before you study, even wrongly, helps you learn better than studying alone: Be Wrong First
• The four brain-level pillars of learning: attention, engagement, error feedback and consolidation: The Four Pillars of Learning