Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.

First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it.

Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives.

Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.

Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.

Flashcards are a simpl...

Retrieval strengthens the memory and interru...

While the brain is not a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger, when the memory is retrieved and the learning is practiced.

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.

every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored.

The need to understand that when learning is hard, you’re doing important work.

Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think.

when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

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

Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

In a simulator, the abstract is made concrete and personal. A simulator is also a series of tests, in that it helps Matt and his instructors calibrate their judgment of where he needs to focus to bring up his mastery.

the truth is you usually can’t embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over.

It makes sense to reread a text once if there’s been a meaningful lapse of time since the first reading, but doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming study strategy that yields negligible benefits

If rereading is largely ineffective, why do students favor it?

rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.

The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the significance of the precepts they describe, their application, or how they relate to what you already know about the subject.

The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what 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.”

We make it to drive home the point that students who don’t quiz themselves (and most do not) tend to overestimate how well...

Albert Einstein declared “creativity is more important than knowledge,”

building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving.

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill.

Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.

the use of testing as a tool for learning.

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 wh...

Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes ...

In effect, retrieval—testing—interrup...

As Matt points out, you hardly ever have an emergency, so if you don’t practice what to do, there’s no way to keep it fresh.

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,

Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast.

Today, we know from empirical research that practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than reexposure to the original material does.

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.

that repeated retrieval can so embed knowledge and skills that they become reflexive: the brain acts before the mind has time to think.

multiple sessions of retrieval practice are generally better than one, especially if the test sessions are spaced out.