“Desirable” Difficulty

Podsie questions should have an appropriate level of difficulty

Last updated on July 7, 2022

Because a question will repeatedly show up in a student's Personal Deck, it's important to write questions that assess a student's knowledge of the underlying content, rather than assessing how good a student is at memorizing the answers to a question. Therefore, we highly recommend that you write questions that are at an acceptable level of “Desirable Difficulty”.

💡

“Desirable Difficulty” is a level that is “challenging but not out-of-reach” for students, and it’s good because this level helps improve long-term learning.

For example, let's consider the following multiple choice question:

To strengthen a hurricane you want ________ waters/temperatures.

A. Warm
B. Cold

For this question, students could guess their way into a correct answer without actually understanding the underlying principles. In general, you want to avoid questions that only have two acceptable answers (eg. True/False questions).

Here would be a much better version of that same question:

Which of these are true about hurricanes? (SELECT ALL THAT APPLY)

A. Cold waters strengthen a hurricane because at lower temperatures, the 
pressure rises for the storm.
B. Warm waters strengthen a hurricane because the storm passes its energy 
into the ocean.
C. Warm waters strengthen a hurricane because the storm sucks up heat energy 
from the water.
D. Cold waters strengthen a hurricane because the cold causes the storm 
molecules to start vibrating with greater intensity.

💡

Overall, we recommend using ’Select All That Apply’ and ’Short Answer’ question types in order to create questions with the appropriate level of difficulty. ‘Multiple Choice’ questions are not as ideal because even though Podsie shuffles answer choices, students could still memorize the answer without understanding the underlying content. If you use a ‘Multiple Choice’ question, we highly recommend adding variations to the question.

Did this answer your question?

😞

😐

🤩