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we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.
Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.
A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.
Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.
Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning.
People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.
The need to understand that when learning is hard, you’re doing important work.
Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think.
The best empirical studies are experimental in nature: the researcher develops a hypothesis and then tests it through a set of experiments that must meet rigorous criteria for design and objectivity.
Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.
Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
However, on a delayed test the benefit of immediate rereading had worn off, and the rereaders performed at the same level as the one-time readers.
If rereading is largely ineffective, why do students favor it? One reason may be that they’re getting bad study advice. But there’s another, subtler way they’re pushed toward this method of review, the phenomenon mentioned earlier: rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.
Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
The upshot is that even the most diligent students are often hobbled by two liabilities: a failure to know the areas where their learning is weak—that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge—and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery.11
As the psychologist Robert Sternberg and two colleagues put it, “one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.”12
Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
One of the most striking research findings is the power of active retrieval—testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit.
The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting.
One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.
various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying
principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on.
Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.
“Unless you keep recalling this maneuver, it will not become a reflex. Like a race car driver in a tight situation or a quarterback dodging a tackle, you’ve got to act out of reflex before you’ve even had time to think. Recalling it over and over, practicing it over and over. That’s just so important.”
a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.2
To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort.
Pitting the learning of basic
knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem.
Thus, and in agreement with later research, multiple sessions of retrieval practice are generally better than one, especially if the test sessions are spaced out.6
Delayed feedback on written tests may help because it gives the student practice that’s spaced out in time; as discussed in the next chapter, spacing practice improves retention.13
In fact, research indicates that testing, compared to rereading, can facilitate better transfer of knowledge to new contexts and problems, and that it improves one’s ability to retain and retrieve material that is related but not tested.
Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention.
Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention.
The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval. After an initial test, delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort.
If learning can be defined as picking up new knowledge or skills and being able to apply them later, then how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. Is it still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world?
Interleaving the practice of two or more subjects or skills
The mixing of problem types, which boosted final test performance by a remarkable 215 percent, actually impeded performance during initial learning.4
Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.
In other words, the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later.
As the sports adage goes, “practice like you play and you will play like you practice.”
The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts.12
The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.
A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in practice, but you do not want so much forgetting that retrieval essentially involves relearning the material.
Sleep seems to play a large role in memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.
Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do.
