Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

human intellectual development is “a lifelong dialogue between inherited tendencies and our life history.”

Richard Nisbett, in his book Intelligence and How to Get It, discusses the pervasiveness of stimuli in modern society that didn’t exist years ago, offering as one simple example a puzzle maze McDonald’s included in its Happy Meals a few years ago that was more difficult than the mazes included in an IQ test for gifted children.

What did they find? Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breast-feeding women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by anywhere from 3.5 to 6.5 points. Certain fatty acids provide building blocks for nerve cell development that the body cannot produce by itself, and the theory behind the results is that these supplements support the creation of new synapses.

are there strategies or behaviors that can serve as cognitive “multipliers” to amp up the performance of the intelligence I’ve already got? Yes. Here are three: embracing a growth mindset, practicing like an expert, and constructing memory cues.

“If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter.

Dweck’s research had been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort.

those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”—become helpless. Those who interpret failure as the result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.

Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder.

When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”18

The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in childhood and learning to overcome it.

A focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, visionary moves that lead to greatness.

more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success.

expert performance does not usually rise out of some genetic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice.

deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance.

Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learners it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of performance that need to be improved, help focus attention on specific aspects, and provide feedback to keep perception and judgment accurate.

The central idea here is that expert performance is a product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of genetic predisposition, and that becoming expert is not beyond the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation, time, and discipline to pursue it.

Mnemonic devices, as we mentioned, are mental tools to help hold material in memory, cued for ready recall.

A memory palace is a more complex type of mnemonic device that is useful for organizing and holding larger volumes of material in memory. It’s based on the method of loci, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and involves associating mental images with a series of physical locations to help cue memories.

derives from the way imagery serves to contribute vividness and connective links to memory.

Humans remember pictures more easily than words.

He experimented with alternatives, finally hitting on the idea of outlining his speech in a series of crude pencil sketches. The sketches did the job. A haystack with a snake under it told him where to start his story about his adventures in Nevada’s Carson Valley. An umbrella tilted against a stiff wind took him to the next part of his story, the fierce winds that blew down out of the Sierras at about two o’clock every afternoon. And so on.

Rhyme schemes can also serve as mnemonic tools. The peg method is a rhyme scheme for remembering lists. Each number from 1 to 20 is paired with a rhyming, concrete image:

You use the rhyming concrete images as “pegs” on which to “hang” items you want to remember, such as the tasks you want to get done today.

A song that you know well can provide a mnemonic structure, linking the lyrics in each musical phrase to an image that will cue retrieval of the desired memory.

The memory palace serves not as a learning tool but as a method to organize what’s already been learned so as to be readily retrievable at essay time. This is a key point and helps to overcome the typical criticism that mnemonics are only useful in rote memorization. To the contrary, when used properly, mnemonics can help organize large bodies of knowledge to permit their ready retrieval.

Moonwalking with Einstein.

The value of mnemonics to raise intellectual abilities comes after mastery of new material, as the students at Bellerbys are using them: as handy mental pockets for filing what they’ve learned, and linking the main ideas in each pocket to vivid memory cues so that they can readily bring them to mind and retrieve the associated concepts and details, in depth, at the unexpected moments that the need arises.

With continued retrieval, complex material can become second nature to a person and the mnemonic cues are no longer needed: you consolidate concepts like Newton’s 3 laws of motion into mental models that you use as a kind of shorthand. Through repeated use, your brain encodes and “chunks” sequences of motor and cognitive actions, and your ability to recall and apply them becomes as automatic as habit.

It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability.

This single fact—that our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape—is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefits is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.

the path to complex mastery or expert performance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails se...

conscious mnemonic devices can help to organize and cue the learning for ready retrieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that characterize expert performance.

the most successful students are those who take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy.

Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connections, building mental models, increasing your capability.

Your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control.

Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory

“Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing. Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading.

When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know?

Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course, both the current week’s work and material covered in prior weeks.

When you quiz yourself, check your answers to make sure that your judgments of what you know and don’t know are accurate.

Use quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your studyin...

The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefit of doing so. Making errors will not set you back, so long as you che...

What your intuition tells you to do: Most studiers focus on underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides. They dedicate their time to rereading these, becoming fluent in the text and terminology, because this feels like learning. Why retrieval practice is better: After one or two reviews of...

The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.

Periodically practicing new knowledge and skills through self-quizzing strengthens your learning of it and your ability to connect it to prior knowledge.

Compared to rereading, self-quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels. But what you don’t sense when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it.

Space Out Your Retrieval Practice

Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.

Another way of spacing retrieval practice is to interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it.