Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

On the other hand, when you let the memory recede a little, for example by spacing or interleaving the practice, retrieval is harder, your performance is less accomplished, and you feel let down, but your learning is deeper and you will retrieve it more easily in the future.

The reason we don’t remember how to tie knots even after we’ve been taught is because we don’t practice and apply what we’ve learned.

If you have ever immersed yourself in writing stories of your past, picturing the people and places of earlier days, you may have been surprised by the memories that started flooding back, things long forgotten now coming to mind.

the easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less your retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it. Conversely, the more effort you have to expend to retrieve knowledge or skill, the more the practice of retrieval will entrench it.

The interleaving and spacing of different pitches made learning more arduous and feel slower.

Those who had practiced on the randomly interspersed pitches now displayed markedly better hitting relative to those who had practiced on one type of pitch thrown over and over.

It is one skill to hit a curveball when you know a curveball will be thrown; it is a different skill to hit a curveball when you don’t know it’s coming.

the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it. In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.9

The more effort that is required to recall a memory or to execute a skill, provided that the effort succeeds, the more the act of recalling or executing benefits the learning.

It’s the effortful process of reconstructing the knowledge that triggers reconsolidation and deeper learning.

Interleaving and variation mix up the contexts of practice and the other skills and knowledge with which the new material is associated. This makes our mental models more versatile, enabling us to apply our learning to a broader range of situations.

But the interleaved strategy, which was more difficult and felt clunky, produced superior discrimination of differences between types, without hindering the ability to learn commonalities within a type.

When you’re asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered.

Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still.

Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot.

What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know?

The kids who had been taught that errors are a natural part of learning showed significantly better use of working memory than did the others.

people who are helped to understand that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control, are more likely to tackle difficult challenges and persist at them.

It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon-fed the solution, even if we fall short in our first attempts at an answer.

Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.

Periodic retrieval of learning helps strengthen connections to the memory and the cues for recalling it, while also weakening routes to competing memories.

the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit.

Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.

The success of a magician or politician, like that of a novelist, relies on the seductive powers of narrative and on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.