Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

1960s, when the psychologist Endel Tulving at the University of Toronto began testing people on their ability to remember lists of common English nouns. In a first phase of the experiment, the participants simply read a list of paired items six times (for example, a pair on the list might be “chair—9”);

After reading the listed pairs six times, participants were then told that they would be getting a list of nouns that they would be asked to remember.

For one group of people, the nouns were the same ones they had just read six times in the prior reading phase; for another group, the nouns to be learned we...

Tulving found that the two groups’ learning of the nouns ...

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

Donald Rumsfeld in a 2002 press briefing about US intelligence on Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction:

there are things we do not know we don’t know.”

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

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.

One, it tells you what you know and don’t know,

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.

Today, we know from empirical research that practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than reexposure to the original material does. This is the testing effect, also known as the retrieval-practice effect.

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.

A second landmark study, published in 1939,

kids studied six-hundred-word articles and then took tests at various times before a final test two months later. The experiment showed a couple of interesting results: the longer the first test was delayed, the greater the forgetting, and second, once a student had taken a test, the forgetting nearly stopped, and the student’s score on subsequent tests dropped very little.5

In 1978, researchers found that massed studying (cramming) leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results in faster forgetting compared to practicing retrieval. In a second test two days after an initial test, the crammers had forgotten 50 percent of what they had been able to recall on the initial test, while those who had spent the same period practicing retrieval instead of studying had forgotten only 13 percent of the information recalled initially.

researchers showed that simply asking a subject to fill in a word’s missing letters resulted in better memory of the word. Consider a list of word pairs. For a pair like foot-shoe, those who studied the pair intact had lower subsequent recall than those who studied the pair from a clue as obvious as foot-s_ _e.

This experiment was a demonstration of what researchers call the “generation effect.”

When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.

On the other hand, the study’s results could be instructive, and participation would bring enticements in the form of smart boards and “clickers”—automated response systems—for the classrooms of participating teachers. Money for new technology is famously tight.

my early experience with tech was similar. I am not certain educators understood the research, but seemed to think the experience with the tech might be interesting.

Studies show that giving feedback strengthens retention more than testing alone does, and, interestingly, some evidence shows that delaying the feedback briefly produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback.

How widely is retrieval practice used as a study technique?

In another survey, only 11 percent of college students said they use this study strategy. Even when they did report testing themselves, they mostly said they did it to discover what they didn’t know, so they could study that material more.

Is repeated testing simply a way to expedite rote learning? 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.

The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval.

I thought even failed retrieval has also been shown to be beneficial.

3 Mix Up Your Practice

Why is spaced practice more effective than massed practice?

embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge—a process that unfolds over hours and may take several days.

spaced practice works better. The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.

Despite these results, the students who participated in these experiments persisted in preferring massed practice, convinced that it served them better. Even after they took the test and could have realized from their own performance that interleaving was the better strategy

Improving Complex Mastery for Medical Students

One form of practice that helps us learn from experience, as the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold recounted in Chapter 2, is reflection.

helping students cultivate it as a habit. He is experimenting with requiring students to write daily or weekly summaries of what they did, how it worked, and what they might do differently next time to get better results.

daily reflection, as a form of spaced retrieval practice, is probably just as critical in the real-world application of medicine as quizzing and testing are in building competencies in medical school.

Medical students and residents go to these conferences and they have no repeated exposure whatsoever

At a minimum, Larsen would like to see something done to interrupt the forgetting: give a quiz at the end of a conference and follow it with spaced retrieval

“Make quizzing a standard part of the culture and the curriculum. You just know every week you’re going to get in your email your ten questions that you need to work through.”

Interesting idea. Send participants questions after conference sessions.

Sleep seems to play a large role in memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.

The common term is “learning from experience.” Some people never seem to learn. One difference, perhaps, between those who do and don’t is whether they have cultivated the habit of reflection. Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?),

precise, and more enduring. Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties, a term coined by the psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork.

so does retrieval after a lapse of some time, because the act of retrieving a memory from long-term storage can both strengthen the memory traces and at the same time make them modifiable again, enabling them, for example, to connect to more recent learning. This process is called reconsolidation. This is how retrieval practice modifies and strengthens learning.

limitation on retrieval is helpful to us: if every memory were always readily to hand, you would have a hard time sorting through the sheer volume of material to put your finger on the knowledge you need

It’s not the knowledge itself that has been forgotten, but the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it.

But if you are given a multiple choice test for the address, you can probably pick it out easily, for it still abides, as it were, in the uncleaned closet of your mind.

When cues are provided, old memories are still there. MC easier than recall. Tip of the tongue.

Part of the Cal Poly team practiced in the standard way. They practiced hitting forty-five pitches, evenly divided into three sets.

For each set of 15 pitches, as the batter saw more of that type, he got gratifyingly better