Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

rest of the team were given a more difficult practice regimen: the three types of pitches were randomly interspersed across the block of forty-five throws.

Those who had practiced on the randomly interspersed pitches now displayed markedly better hitting relative to those who had practiced on one type of pitch thrown over and over.

responses led to little durable learning. It is one skill to hit a curveball when you know a curveball will be thrown; it is a different skill to hit a curveball when you don’t know it’s coming. Baseball players need to build the latter skill, but they often practice the former, which, being a form of massed practice, builds performance gains on short-term memory.

How Effort Helps Reconsolidating Memory

Effortful recall of learning, as happens in spaced practice, requires that you “reload” or reconstruct the components of the skill or material anew from long-term memory rather than mindlessly repeating them from short-term memory.

During this focused, effortful recall, the learning is made pliable again: the most salient aspects of it become clearer, and the consequent reconsolidation helps to reinforce meaning, strengthen connections to prior knowledge, bolster the cues and re...

Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cu...

Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material.

Spaced and interleaved exposure characterizes most of humans’ normal experience.

Why experience adds to formal instruction.

Other Learning Strategies That Incorporate Desirable Difficulties

Should the outline of a lecture follow the precise flow of a chapter in a textbook, or is it better if the lecture mismatches the text in some ways? It turns out that when the outline of a lecture proceeds in a different order from the textbook passage, the effort to discern the main ideas and reconcile the discrepancy produces better recall of the content.

One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.”

1950s and 1960s, the psychologist B. F. Skinner advocated the adoption of “errorless learning” methods

result from faulty instruction. The theory of errorless learning gave rise to instructional techniques in which learners were spoonfed new material in small bites and immediately quizzed on them while they still remained on the tongue, so to speak, fresh in short-term memory and easily spit out onto the test form.

To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.

5 Avoid Illusions of Knowing

Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition

When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation.

The results showed that overhearing one side of a conversation proved more distracting than overhearing both sides, and the content of those partial conversations was better recalled later by the unintentional eavesdroppers. Why was this? Presumably, those overhearing half a conversation were strongly compelled to try to infer the missing half in a way that made for a complete narrative.

We strive to fit the events of our lives into a cohesive story that accounts for our circumstances, the things that befall us, and the choices we make.

The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the national political debate, where like-minded people gather online, at community meetings, and in the media to find common purpose and expand the story they feel best explains their sense of how the world works and how humans and politicians should behave.

The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it.

As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory (the curse of knowledge).

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence. This phenomenon, of particular interest for metacognition, has been named the Dunning-Kruger effect after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger.

experiment, after taking an initial test and rating their own performance, the students were shown the other students’ answers and then their own answers and asked to reestimate the number of test questions they had answered correctly. The students whose performance was in the bottom quartile failed to judge their own performance more accurately after seeing the more competent choices

Our susceptibility to illusion and misjudgment should give us all pause, and especially so to the advocates of “student-directed learning,” a theory now current among some parents and educators.

This theory holds that students know best what they need to study to master a subject, and what pace and methods work best for them.

But few students practice these strategies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if they are to practice them effectively:

Why student directed learning still needs external guidance and standards.

But of course the football player is not self-directed, his practice is guided by a coach.

The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.

Doing cumulative quizzing, as Andy Sobel does in his political economics course, is especially powerful for consolidating learning and knitting the concepts from one stage of a course into new material encountered later.

Peer instruction, a learning model developed by Eric Mazur,

In class, the lecture is interspersed with quick tests that present students with a conceptual question and give them a minute or two to grapple with it; they then try, in small groups, to reach a consensus on the correct answer.

Is this a tactic students could apply outside of class but tend not to make the effort?

David Dunning argues that the path to self-insight leads through other people.

Think of the kids lining up to join the softball team—would you be picked?

6 Get Beyond Learning Styles

In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fits those preferences.

Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters, but what exactly is it?

Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence. 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.

of intelligence, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again. Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research.

7 Increase Your Abilities

The number of synapses peaks at the age of one or two, at about 50 percent higher than the average number we possess as adults.

A plateau period follows that lasts until around puberty, whereupon this overabundance begins to decline as the brain goes through a period of synaptic pruning.

It is during the time when no, or little, synapse formation occurs that most learning takes place” and we develop adult-level skills in language, mathematics, and logic.

Likewise, IQs in every industrialized part of the world have shown a sustained rise since the start of standardized sampling in 1932, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect after the political scientist who first brought it to wide attention.

In the United States, the average IQ has risen eighteen points in the last sixty years.

The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in childhood and learning to overcome it. Tough writes that children in the lowest strata of society are so beset by challenges and starved of resources that they don’t stand a chance of experiencing success. But, and here’s another paradox, kids at the top of the heap, who are raised in cosseted settings, praised for being smart, bailed out of predicaments by helicopter parents, and never allowed to fail or overcome adversity on their own initiative, are also denied the character-building experiences essential for success later in life.

8 Make It Stick

Tips for Lifelong Learners