It was intriguing to find that there was no apparent correlation between the perceived amount effort and learning that students reported. Thus, the quantity and perceived difficulty of effort alone appears insufficient for students to perceive learning gains. Others have also observed a disconnect and even inverse relationship between effortful but effective approaches and student perceptions of learning . The apparent lack of relation (or potentially inverse relation) between students' effort and their perceived learning is somewhat counter-intuitive and surprising given that researchers have established a positive and direct link between effort and academic performance . If deliberate practice (effort) builds expertise (learning), why do students not always appear to recognize this? The leading explanation is that students can misinterpret increased mental effort as ineffective learning. This has important implications for students who wish to self-regulate their learning, requiring of them some metacognition around this disconnect. Instructors who employ such effortful "active" strategies can also help students avoid this misinterpretation trap by raising students' awareness of this issue early in their courses and when mental effort requirements are likely to be high. In contrast to how effort related to student perceptions of learning, the extent of pleasure that students reported during their course experience did correlate, albeit very weakly, with their perception of learning. Of course, correlation is not necessarily causal, and without further qualifying information to identify that to which student learning was attributed, one cannot conclude whether students' pleasure caused learning or vice versa or both. It has been demonstrated experimentally that acquiring knowledge can be emotionally pleasing, and this is more likely to occur when the knowledge acquired satisfies one's curiosity ; two salient examples include the tendency to prefer new music and that of infants for new foods . Thus, while there is evidence to suggest that learning causes pleasure, the extent to which this happened in this context is a complicated matter beyond scope and difficult to resolve.