Desirable Difficulties and JCSpell

"Requiring students to organize new information and to work harder in the initial learning period can lead to greater and deeper learning.  Although this struggle, dubbed a desirable difficulty by investigator R.A. Bjork (1994), may at first be frustrating to learner and teacher alike, ultimately it improves long-term retention."

JCSpell employs "desirable difficulty" by using words from the Ayres Word List to analyze during the learning routine Think to Spell. The list is composed of high frequency words ranked in order of difficulty. So, with each lesson, students are continually moving to more difficult words. This means that students are studying words that are at or above their reading level.