RightChallenge is an educational method designed to:

• Prevent learner frustration and fatigue
• Increase retention of information over time
• Match learner ability with difficulty of material

The RightChallenge method:

RightChallenge slowly increases the difficulty level of material over time. At certain intervals, the learner's comprehension of the material is tested. If material seems to be too challenging for the learner, RightChallenge responds by decreasing difficulty. If material seems to be too easy, RightChallenge responds by challenging the learner further. This means that the cognitive challenge is kept in the appropriate and ideal zone.

How RightChallenge creates the ideal learning environment:

In order to retain information, the human brain must form a strong synaptic network. According to a Princeton University study, Synaptic Reentry Reinforcement Based Network Model for Long-Term Memory Consolidation:

"...new rounds of synaptic modification triggered by memory reactivation...lead to...consolidation...of memory traces."

RightChallenge works by inducing multiple memory traces rapidly, but automatically varying the semantic form of the question. An analogy would be forming a path in a forest. If only one person walks, there is not much of a path. If multiple people follow the same route, a path starts forming. In a similar way, RightChallenge aims to assist in forming retention, then retention without the support of context, and finally, understanding of the interrelationships of the bits of knowledge acquired.

The Talent Code

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.

Daniel Coyle

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways- operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes- makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors and correct them- as you would if you were walking an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go- end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

"We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it’s really a terrible way to learn," said Robert Bjork, the man who developed the above examples. Bjork, the chair of psychology at UCLA, has spent most of his life delving into questions of memory and learning. He’s a cheerful; polymath, equally adept at discussing curves of memory decay or how NBS star Shaquille O’Neal, who is notoriously terrible at shooting free throws, should practice them from odd distances- 14 feet and 16 feet, instead of the standard 15 feet. (Bjork’s diagnosis: "Shaq needs to develop the ability to modulate his motor programs. Until then he’ll keep being awful.")

"Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul," Bjork said. "One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations." Bjork cites an experiment by psychologist Henry Roediger at Washington State University of St. Louis, where students were divided into two groups to study natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more. (Catherine Fritz, one of Bjork’s students, said she applied these ideas to her schoolwork, and raised her GPA by a full point while studying half as much.)

The reason, Bjork explained, resides in the way our brains are built. "We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that’s wrong," he said. "It’s a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn."

When you’re practicing deeply, the world’s usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does.

"It’s all about finding the sweet spot," Bjork said. "There’s an optimal gap between what you know and what you’re trying to do. When you find that sweet spot, learning takes off."

Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it’s vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability.

The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events we normally strive to avoid- namely, mistakes- and turns them into skills. To understand how deep practice works, then, it’s first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial importance of errors to the learning process.

The best way to understand the concept of deep practice is to do it. Take a few seconds to look at the following lists; spend the same amount of time on each one. 

Scientific Learning Principles

1. Must attend closely to features of sensory task.
2. To maintain attention, must be able to perform task at a high level of accuracy (if the task is too difficult, learning cannot be achieved and changes in sensory map do not occur).
3. Behavior must be reinforced in a highly consistent and rewarding manner to maintain motivation and drive learning through corrective feedback.
4. Highly consistent, repetitive input must be given over an intense period of time so that consistent patterns of neuronal activation occur repetitively, building specific stimulation patterns to “represent” the input from the environment in the brain.
5. Once a behavior is established (i.e., the response is accurate and consistent), learning can be driven most effectively by systematically increasing the difficulty of the task as performance improves.

Tallal, Merzenich, Jenkins, & Miller (1999)

What aspects of learning are necessary to drive these physiological changes? Behavioral training studies coupled with physiological recording at the level of the single neuron have shown that there are several components of the learning process that are critical. First, the subject must attend closely to features of a sensory task. Second, in order for attention to be maintained, the subject must be able to perform the task at a high level of accuracy. If the task is too difficult, learning cannot be achieved and changes in the sensory map do not occur. Behavior must be reinforced in a highly consistent and rewarding manner to maintain motivation and drive learning through corrective feedback. Highly consistent, repetitive input must be given over an intense period of time so that consistent patterns of neuronal activation occur repetitively, sharpening specific stimulation patterns to “represent” this input from the environment in the brain. Finally, having established a behavior that can be responded to accurately and consistently, learning can be driven most effectively by systematically increasing the difficulty of the task as the subject’s performance improves. Merzenich and colleagues have referred to these features of the learning process as “scientific learning principles” and have demonstrated that neuroplasticity at the neuronal level accompanies behavioral learning (Merzenich & Jenkins, 1998).