In higher education, many students make poor learning strategy decisions. This, in part, results from the counterintuitive nature of effective learning strategies: they enhance long-term learning but also cost high initial effort and appear to not improve learning (immediately). This mixed-method study investigated how students make learning strategy decisions in category learning, and whether students can be supported to make effective strategy decisions through a metacognitive prompt, designed to support accurate monitoring of effort and learning. Participants (N = 150) studied painting styles through blocked and interleaved practice, rated their perceived effort and perceived learning across time, and chose between either blocked or interleaved practice. Half of the participants (N = 74) were provided with a metacognitive prompt that showed them how their subjective experiences per strategy changed across time and required them to relate these experiences to the efficacy of learning strategies. Results indicated that subjective experiences with interleaved practice improved across time: students’ perceived learning increased as their perceived effort decreased. Mediation analysis revealed that the increased feeling of learning increased the likelihood to select interleaved practice. The percentage of students who chose interleaved practice increased from 13 to 40%. Students’ learning strategy decisions, however, did not benefit from the metacognitive prompt. Qualitative results revealed that students initially had inaccurate beliefs about the efficacy of learning strategies, but on-task experiences overrode the influence of prior beliefs in learning strategy decisions. This study suggests that repeated monitoring of effort and learning have the potential to improve the use of interleaved practice.

Desirable difficulties are learning conditions that are often experienced as effortful, but have a positive effect on learning results and transfer of knowledge and skills (Bjork & Bjork, 2011; Bjork, 1994). Learners often do not appreciate the beneficial effects of desirable difficulties, and the negative experiences of high effort and perceived low learning make them resistant to engage in desirable difficulties (Biwer et al., 2020a). This ultimately limits learning outcomes and academic achievement. With the increasing emphasis on self-regulation in education, characterized by higher learner agency and abundant choices in what, when, and how to study, the field of educational psychology is in need of theoretical and empirically testable assumptions that improve self-regulation in desirably difficult learning conditions with the aim to foster self-regulation abilities, learning outcomes, and academic achievement. Here, we present a framework that describes how to support self-regulation of effort when engaging in desirable difficulties: the “Start and Stick to Desirable Difficulties (S2D2)” framework. The framework builds on the Effort Monitoring and Regulation model (de Bruin et al., 2020). The aim of this framework is (1) to describe evidence for the central role of perceived effort and perceived learning in (dis)engagement in desirable difficulties, and (2) to review evidence on, and provide an agenda for research to improve learners’ self-regulated use of desirable difficulties to help them start and persist when learning feels tough, but is actually effective.

The present study investigated the extent to which 18 dyads in 5th and 6th grade, who experienced low levels of social challenge, differed from 12 dyads who experience high levels of social challenge in terms of the quality of their written assignment, as well as the frequency and sequential pattern of their cognitive, metacognitive, relational, and off-task activities during a collaborative hypermedia assignment. Sequential analyses were performed by means of process mining with a fuzzy miner algorithm. Results showed that assignment quality was higher for low social challenge dyads. In addition, these more successful dyads showed more cognitive processing activities, more high-cognition, and fewer off-task activities. In terms of their process models, low and high challenge dyads showed marked differences. More specifically, high social challenge dyads showed a vicious cycle of social challenges and off-task behaviors, whereas low social challenge dyads engaged in high-cognition. In addition, for low challenge dyads, but not high challenge dyads, the various metacognitive activities were closely connected to each other. These findings indicate that social challenges not only affect assignment quality, but also fundamentally affect the overall learning process.

Running behavioral studies online is a challenge as well as an opportunity we have been facing for several years. It allows collecting data quickly and from a much more diverse population compared to physical data collection. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed forward the development of guidelines based on experiences of success and failures. There are many considerations to take for getting the most benefit from collecting data online. We share hereby our own experience referring to research questions, software environment, participants, and data quality control, in the sincere hope to help others who are interested in utilizing online data collection for behavioral research.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The presentation of Fig. 1 was incorrect as it misses an arrow from "High-Cognition" to "Support" and misses two numbers next to the arrow displayed just to the right of "High-Cognition". The corrected figure is given below. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.