Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Moreover, their review showed that it is more important that the mode of instruction match the nature of the subject being taught: visual instruction for geometry and geography, verbal instruction for poetry, and so on.

Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.7

exigencies

Analytical intelligence is our ability to complete problem-solving tasks such as those typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to synthesize and apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability to adapt to everyday life—to understand what needs to be done in a specific setting and then do it; what we call street smarts. Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in a particular situation is not measured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies.

The upper limits of your performance in any cognitive or manual skill may be set by factors beyond your control, such as your intelligence and the natural limits of your ability, but most of us can learn to perform nearer to our full potential in most areas by discovering our weaknesses and working to bring them up.12

One of these differences is the idea mentioned earlier that psychologists call structure building: the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them. These frameworks are sometimes called mental models or mental maps.

Structure building is a form of conscious and subconscious discipline: stuff fits or it doesn’t; it adds nuance, capacity and meaning, or it obscures and overfreights.

However, we know that high structure-builders and rule learners are more successful in transferring their learning to unfamiliar situations than are low structure-builders and example learners.

Remember that difficulties you can overcome with greater cognitive effort will more than repay you in the depth and durability of your learning.

The thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, performance.

The relationship of neurogenesis to learning and memory is a new field of inquiry, but already scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning (that is, of learning and remembering the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces) stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus.

cosseted

It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice.

The effort and persistence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to accommodate higher performance, but achieving expertise in any field is particular to the field. It does not confer some kind of advantage or head start toward gaining expertise in another domain.

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

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

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.

The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future.

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

Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.

Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution.

If you don’t supply the answer, you may be giving in to the illusion of knowing, when in fact you would have difficulty rendering an accurate or complete response.

“I figure out how much I’ve got to learn. I try to estimate how much I can learn in a day, and then I try to start early enough to get that learned.”3

leery

prose.

recitation

felicitous

(Stretch goals are ones that cannot be reached through incremental improvement but require significant restructuring of methods.)

Problems become information rather than failures. And learning by solving the problems (generation) and by teaching others (elaboration) becomes an engine for continuous improvement of performance by individuals and by the production line that they compose.