Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

our success is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and persistence.

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.

What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing.

the path to complex mastery or expert performance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self-discipline, grit, and persistence; with

Learning Tips for Students

Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise.

Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory

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

How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: 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.

Use quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your studying to make them strong.

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

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

Space Out Your Retrieval Practice

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

How to use spaced practice as a study strategy:

Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse be...

New material in a text may need to be revisited within a day or so of your first encounter with it. Then, perhaps not again for several days or a week.

When you are feeling more sure of your mastery of certain material, quiz yourself on it once a month.

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.

In effect, you’re “reloading” it from long-term memory. This effort to reconstruct the learning makes the important ideas more salient and memorable and connects them more securely to other knowledge and to more recent learning.

Interleave the Study of Different Problem Types

What does this mean? If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions.

mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution.

Why interleaved practice is better: Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real-world settings where you must discern the kind of problem you’re trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution.

Even when learners achieve superior mastery from interleaved practice, they persist in feeling that blocked practice serves them better.

Other Effective Study Strategies

GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning.

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

REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.

What is it? Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you

CALIBRATION is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time.

The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate.

For instance: Airline pilots use flight instruments to know when their perceptual systems are misleading them about critical factors like whether the airplane is flying level.

Treat practice tests as tests, check your answers, and focus your studying effort on the areas where you are not up to snuff.

more mindful of that when he studied. “I would stop. ‘Okay, what did I just read? What is this about?’ I’d have to think about it.

“You just have to trust the process, and that was really the biggest hurdle for me, was to get myself to trust it.

“When you go back and review, instead of just rereading you need to see if you can recall the learning.

Do I remember what this stuff was about? You always test yourself first. And if you don’t remember, then that’s when you go back and look at it and try again.”

Your grasp of unfamiliar material often starts out feeling clumsy and approximate. But once you engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, the mind begins to “knit” at the problem on its own.

when things don’t go well, you keep working anyway. You persevere.”

“I took a practice test every three days, saw what I got wrong, and adjusted.” Shooting her azimuth.

(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.