Confusion
What happens when you’re confused?
There are some obvious things.
You feel anxious. ..you concentrate harder on what you’re doing… you fling Ikea instructions across the room while swearing with such vigor and passion that your wife gently suggests a call to one of your more "handy" friends for help — setting you off to the point where you briefly consider burning the entire country of Sweden down to its permanently frozen ground.
Beyond those obvious things… some other things are happening too. I’ve recently read some things in the news that suggest that maybe, more than anything, what’s happening when you’re confused is that you’re getting smarter.
The incomparable Traci Knudson passed this interesting article along to the instructional design team last week.
It describes a study whose basic gist is that "learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors" and that incorrect answers are, essentially, high-octane learning fuel.
It was an interesting article about an interesting study, and it reinforces the approach that we use in developing games, scenarios and other interactions. As previously blogged, we want to make our courseware tough for the learner so that we can drive them to expectation failure. Because that’s when learning happens.
Reading this story reminded me of another article from a couple weeks ago, about another study, similarly focused on what happens when people are confused.
This study says that confronting the brain with patterns that may seem meaningless "primes" the brain to see logic and patterns that the brain would otherwise miss. The article describes how subjects performed demonstrably better in a test where they had to recognize patterns in letter strings right after they tried to make sense out of an absurdist Kafka story. Trying to figure out the pattern of the Kafka story improved the subjects’ ability in the test without them being aware of it.
I’m taking two things from this study:
1) When my mom reminded me to make sure that to eat a good breakfast the morning of a big test, she should have probably been urging me instead to assemble a coffee table with umlauts in its name. Sure, that would be a weird morning, but I bet I would have done better.
2) This study speaks to why games are effective tools for learning. Our games and simulations are designed around a series of patterns: You do X, and then Y happens. Part of the fun of games is that we don’t make these algorithms explicit to the learner at the top of the game (“If you remember to thoroughly investigate your prospect’s needs during the first part of the sales conversation, there will be a trumpet sound, your avatar will be dressed in a suit and then there will be a cool-looking animation informing you that you’ve unlocked another level.”) This article makes me think that trying to figure out the pattern of the game might make the learner more receptive to the content that we’re trying to teach.
Confusion… takes off sunglasses it’s not easy to understand, but it’s interesting.
Bill Cochran
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Senior Instructional Designer
NogginLabs, Inc.
