In this blog post, Karl Kapp, the assistant director at Bloomsburg University’s Institute for Interactive Technologies in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, looks at how struggling with learning material is essential to learning and growth. He discusses the term “disfluent” from Charles Duhigg’s book, “Smarter, Faster, Better.” Disfluency can be defined as a process where something is “harder to process at first but stickier once it [is] really understood.” Kapp points to an example from the book where a struggling elementary school district is given a plethora of data from dashboards, spreadsheets, and other electronic sources. Despite the data, the district does not really start understanding students’ needs until teachers are tasked with manipulating the data by hand. “Rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it,” Kapp says. The school district improved not because there was more data, but because teachers began understanding the data. According to Kapp, “The act of struggling and manipulating and engaging with content will make it more meaningful and more memorable.”