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New Research Shows Cognitive Appraisal of Discomfort is Key to Learning
New research shows that discomfort can actually be harnessed to encourage students to try harder and get more work done than giving them easy tasks. According to the author of this research, “People commonly aspire to improve themselves and thus become a better version of themselves. Yet the process of personal growth can be uncomfortable.” (Woolley and Fishbach)
The researchers had previously shown that fun tasks were easier to motivate participants to complete than boring tasks, but making tasks fun is not always so simple. In this new study, the authors laid out a series of different tasks trying to find new ways to motivate participants to persevere when doing uncomfortable tasks.
The series of experiments that they set up were meant to challenge their participants in a number of domains by making them socially, emotionally, or politically uncomfortable. The types of tasks the participants engaged in included a public speaking exercise meant to make them socially uncomfortable, a writing exercise meant to make them emotionally uncomfortable, and a reading exercise meant to make them politically uncomfortable.
The researchers used a technique called “cognitive appraisal” which teaches people to actively reconsider their feelings and recontextualize them via instruction. During each of the tasks, the researchers instructed the participants to seek out discomfort as their goal and told them that discomfort was a sign that the experiment was working and helping them to grow in the targeted area.
For example, participants reading about an opposing political view were more motivated to read and consider views different to their own when they were told the goal was to seek discomfort for personal growth rather than to “learn”. While both approaches seek to increase “learning”, contextualizing the activity not as simply a learning task, but a way to broaden one’s horizons and become more comfortable with different viewpoints had more success than telling participants to learn from the materials they disagreed with.
Similarly, participants were more willing to reengage with the emotionally uncomfortable writing task when the goal was to challenge themselves to deal with uncomfortable emotions rather than just complete a writing task. In the public speaking task as well, participants that were instructed to seek out discomfort as a sign that they were improving showed more risk taking behavior and so were more likely to participate.
In each of the tasks, asking the participants to reappraise their feelings of discomfort from a sign that what they were doing was bad into a sign that they were growing as a person increased their motivation to push past these negative feelings and complete more of the task. This research shows that cognitive reappraisal is key in helping people to change their mindset about discomfort.
Discomfort is Required for Growth
People all too often avoid things that make them uncomfortable because their minds are reporting the activity as a threat to their status quo. While the body might not like taking risks, some risks are always necessary in order to see improvement and move past the status quo.
Athletes are a perfect example of experts at cognitive reappraisal. Physical training can often be a very grueling process that is uncomfortable to endure. Athletes must continually push themselves into the level of feeling discomfort in order to improve in their sport. An athlete who simply goes into training and does a few easy exercises may not only fail to improve, but their body and endurance may even atrophy, leaving them less able than they were before.
Similarly in learning, students who only do the bare minimum will never truly learn. Students also need to learn to always be pushing themselves to a healthy limit and seeking tasks that make them uncomfortable.
For example, if a student picks a book well below their reading level, they will not learn any new vocabulary or see examples of more advanced sentence structures or authorial techniques. Students should always be seeking books that include words they need to look up, things they need to stop and consider, or even things that require them to seek help from the teacher.
If they are able to simply do everything alone with no discomfort, they are not truly learning, and just like the atrophying athletes, may even lose some of their ability to read difficult works as they will not be practicing their approaches to learning that help them to dig through difficult texts.
Defining Discomfort
While students need to be “uncomfortable” in order to be learning, it is important to differentiate “discomfort” from other similar emotions like fear and pain. While discomfort is required for learning, pain and fear have been shown time and time again to completely short circuit the mechanisms of learning in the brain.
- Pain is not Discomfort
The cliche of “No Pain, No Gain” has the same pitfalls in education as in exercise. While athletes are always seeking discomfort, pain is not discomfort. Pain is often a signal that damage is being done to the body and that the athlete is at risk of injuring themselves.
Similarly, students that are experiencing emotional pain or fear of shame are not going to be learning through their discomfort. While teachers should push students to seek activities that challenge them, they always need to be on the watch for things like bullying, depression, and other forms of more severe pain. While students should try hard things, if the teacher hears the student berating themselves for doing poorly or hears other students mocking them, it is time for a quick and firm intervention.
- Fear is not Discomfort
Fear of consequences can shut down the logic centers of the brain and make people act emotionally. This is obviously bad for children and teenagers whose brains are still developing in this area. While discomfort can be used to push students to go further, fear can also be used to push students to complete tasks, however it comes with a raft of negative consequences.
Fear of upsetting parents or reduced college perspectives can completely override any logical centers of the brain by activating the amygdala. The amygdala processes these negative emotions and causes people to react emotionally rather than using their logic centers. Prolonged amygdala activation also leads to a host of negative mental and physical health effects.
So while both fear and discomfort can be used to motivate students, one helps students see the benefits of hard work while the other can give them mental health issues and even make them physically ill. Teachers need to be on the watch for students dreading to come to their class or students who regularly obsess about their grades. Even seemingly flippant phrases like “my mom’s gonna kill me!” need to be noted and perhaps discussed at the next parent teacher conference.
- Long Term Stress is not Discomfort
While short term stress and discomfort are nearly synonyms, long term stress, just like fear, is known to induce many negative health effects. Asking students to push themselves in short bursts is what will give the positive benefits mentioned in this new research. Teachers who constantly push students to give more and more will end up draining their students and making them dread coming to class.
Teachers also need to keep in mind that their class is often just one of 6-8 other classes that students are taking. Even if they feel the load that they are giving students is more than manageable, other teachers will also be pushing their students in the same way.
Teachers should seek to do their pushing of discomfort only during class hours. Homework, if included at all, should be simple, easy, and maybe even fun. The stressful tasks should be contained within the safe environment of the classroom so that teachers can better monitor how students are coping. If class is full of fun classwork and all of the stressful and uncomfortable studying is done alone at home, teachers can lose sight of how much they are actually asking of their students.
Can Discomfort be Fun?
There seems to be a trend in education currently that is focused on making learning as effortless for students as possible. Making learning fun and engaging is important to keep students attention, but are all fun and engaging things easy?
Students outside of a school context often actively seek out very difficult challenges in the form of video games designed to be frustratingly difficult. One classic example of this is “Unfair Mario”. In Unfair Mario, players are greeted with the familiar classic 2D Mario levels, but the game warns that as they progress there will be hidden traps, incredibly overpowered enemies, and other frustrating challenges that they will have to overcome.
As players walk along the seemingly tame level, spikes appear out of nowhere, enemies fly across the screen at insane speeds, and invisible blocks are sometimes the only way to progress. Despite these frustrating and unfair challenges many players spent hours upon hours learning the subtle tricks required to progress and be one of the few capable of saying they beat this “impossible” game.
Other examples of frustratingly difficult games include famous titles such as Dark Souls that are punishingly difficult and often require near perfect execution to move past certain bosses or levels. Players must fight the same enemies and go through the same scenarios dozens or even hundreds of times, persevering past the frustrating “YOU DIED” message that taunts them at every failure.
Europa Universalis 4 is another game that prides itself on difficulty. In this game, computer opponents actively use many cheats and the game is designed to be unfair. The game does not attempt to hide this, and in fact directly tells players that the AI opponents will cheat in tooltips as the game loads in. Despite this, and despite being a game that is almost 10 years old, it still has a large active player base of ravenous fans.
Why Do Students Avoid Challenges in School?
Knowing all of this, teachers may be frustrated and confused at why their students complain at even the smallest of challenges that they give students. There are several key differences, however, in the way that teachers and schools present challenges that differ from the way video games present their challenges.
It is important to understand these key differences in order to not kill students’ confidence and keep them coming back for more challenges.
- Video Games Give Infinite Retries.
One of the key differences between the challenges of school and video games is that in school, students often only have one chance to complete challenges like tests and quizzes. In video games, players are expected to fail multiple times. Players are either given multiple “lives” where they can die, but keep going, or sometimes they are given “save points” where no matter how often they die, they can always return back to the save point with minimal or no consequences.
This safety provided by extra lives and especially by save points allows players to not worry about the consequences of taking risks when learning a new area of the game. Players can test out new strategies, have fun, and try risky or creative solutions that they would not dare try if they knew there would be consequences.
In school, students are not afraid of the challenge, they are afraid of failure, and the consequences that could come such as angry parents or lowered college prospects. Because of this fear, students often will simply take the safest routes to get a good grade.
Students afraid for their grades will often simply parrot back things they’ve heard from the teacher rather than giving creative answers. While this might be ok for simple things like multiple choice or short answer tests, eventually, most teachers will want their students to think more creatively to solve real world problems and show that knowledge in creative analytical writing.
Teachers should seek to give quizzes and tests that encourage students to try multiple approaches to see which is most efficient at getting the right answer. Even seemingly black and white classes like math always have multiple ways to solve problems.
Allowing students to always redo work or giving online tests that measure students efficiency or speed will encourage them to retry their work in order to get a higher score. This not only dispels the fear of the consequences of a bad grade like an angry parent or lowered prospects for further education, but also encourages students to actually do more work of their own volition.
- Video Games Immediately Reward Correct Answers.
Teachers may be confused as to how they can measure students efficiency or speed in solving test problems besides simply using a timer. Most tests given by teachers are simple word problems with a blank at the end for students to fill in. This is another of the significant differences between the way video games present challenges compared to school.
Video games present their challenges as full experiences that tell a story, give visuals, and have purpose. The only purpose of filling in a blank on a flat sheet of paper is to get a score and please the teacher. At the end of a test, they haven’t learned how to do anything practical, nor have they solved any real world problems.
Video games give players satisfying endings to their challenges. One of the common challenges in many video games is finding out how to open some locked door or treasure chest to progress to a new area and get new and exciting items. When players finally solve a difficult problem, they are greeted with happy auditory and visual effects that lights up the dopamine centers of their brain and gives them a rush of satisfaction for all of their hard work.
Students who put a correct answer into a test blank are greeted with no immediate reward. They are not even sure until several days later that their answer was even correct as they have to wait for the teacher to grade and return their work to them. By this time, they have mentally long since moved on and any reward they receive is no longer connected to their efforts during the test.
Imagine if in a video game, players had to test solutions and then wait a day to see if the chest or door opened. In this light, it is obvious that effort and reward need to be more closely linked in time to be effective. This time between giving an answer and receiving the feedback on it leads to anxiety and fear for those who are deeply concerned and causes less focused students to have completely disengaged by the time they see their results.
Teachers need to move on from traditional paper and pencil tests and switch to online programs that tell students the results of their efforts immediately. Programs like Kahoot give players fun visuals, but also show students whether their answer was correct or not right after each question.
Kahoot is already very popular for casual contests between students in school, but programs like this need to be adopted not only for fun classwork, but official graded assignments as well. Students can compete to answer the quickest, get high scores, and can play again and again.
- Video Games Make Difficulty a Main Measure of Skill.
Another key difference between the way school and video games present challenges is that in a video game, if things aren’t getting harder, they aren’t fun. In school, students are expected to “keep up” and work should remain about the same level of difficulty if they study and prepare adequately.
In video games, each level or boss is meant to be significantly harder than the last, and that is the whole point. Players are supposed to increase in skill just like students are supposed to increase in knowledge, but in video games increases in skill are not just to “keep up” but to complete difficult challenges.
Some games even have different modes for the game that they label as “easy mode” or “hard mode”. Players are often given badges or other rewards for beating certain bosses on different difficulty modes. For example, beating a boss on easy may give players a small reward while beating that same boss on hard mode might give the player a rare achievement or even gear that most other players do not have.
Giving students access to many different tests or quizzes and allowing them to tackle them at any point gives students another motivator to try work besides simply keeping up. This also allows students to all work at their own pace. Strong students might plow ahead, completing challenges early in the year while weaker students might need to do work more slowly and have guidance to complete certain quizzes.
If teachers label tests by difficulty like game designers label their game modes, students will want to “beat” different challenges to compete with themselves and their friends. Not only does it give a student bragging rights to complete the midterm a month before it is due, it makes it way more fun when they can say they beat the midterm on “hard mode” with a perfect score under a certain time limit.
While the strong students are all competing with each other to beat the hardest version of the teacher’s tests as possible, this approach gives teachers the time to differentiate and spend time with students who are struggling to pass certain “levels” or tests in their course.
Rather than tests being a terrifying looming moment that is make or break for their grades, tests being available at any point makes them fun challenges to try and finish early or get high scores. As long as students complete the work, do their best, and learn in a way that helps them gain real world skills, it really does not matter if they did a certain test on a specific date. In fact, teachers can use the dates that students are doing various attempts to collect even more useful data on student progress.
In the traditional approach, the only way to measure if a student is behind or not is by testing them and giving them a score on how much of the content they were able to correctly insert into the test. There are actually many different reasons why a student might have gotten a certain score on a specific day though. They might have had a problem that day, they might have been scared for their grades, or they might simply have misunderstood some test questions because it was their first and only time to see it.
With this gamified approach however, teachers can measure how far along the students are by seeing how many of the year’s tests they have completed at any given moment, how many attempts they took, and the change in score from each attempt. This gives teachers a lot more information about what the issue is for each individual student.
If a student scores low on one attempt, but then tries again another day and scores well, this is probably an indicator that something was just off with them that day and it really isn’t a big deal. If students are only giving each test one attempt on easy mode, that might indicate they are being a bit lazy and need to try more if they want to receive a good grade at the end of the course. If students are scoring low initially, but each attempt their scores increase, this shows that they are learning appropriately and the tests are teaching them the skills they need to complete their work and move on to the next level of learning.
Conclusion
While teachers should be careful with how far they push their students, some amount of discomfort is actually a requirement to really be doing any learning. If a student is not pushing themselves into the unknown and simply regurgitating answers they have received from the teacher, they are not going to be successful later in life when answers to problems no longer come prepackaged as bold text in their textbooks.
Students are not afraid of a challenge, they are afraid of consequences. Teachers can use the tips from this research to help students harness their discomfort to push themselves further. They can also work to reduce the fear-inducing consequences that come along with grades, but still gather data about student success through utilizing online resources that give students immediate feedback and allow multiple attempts.
Rather than trying to make learning easier for students, teachers should be trying to find ways to make it more challenging, but also with fewer consequences. Many teachers are reluctant to take away consequences for fear that students will no longer have the motivation to learn, but this research shows that the opposite is actually true. Students love challenges, and actively seek them out in their free time, and it is only fear that holds them back from diving back in again and again to get that high score.
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References
Woolley, Kaitlin, and Ayelet Fishbach. “Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort.” Psychological Science, vol. 33, no. 4, 2022, pp. 510–523., https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211044685.
