Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.

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

We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not.

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.

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.

When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice.

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.

All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.

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.

It’s true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting.

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.

Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.

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.

The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem.

Delayed feedback on written tests may help because it gives the student practice that’s spaced out in time;

Tests that require the learner to supply the answer, like an essay or short-answer test, or simply practice with flashcards, appear to be more effective than simple recognition tests like multiple choice or true/false tests.

We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.

Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility.

The basic idea is that varied practice—like tossing your beanbags into baskets at mixed distances—improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another.

The myths of massed practice are hard to exorcise, even when you’re experiencing the evidence yourself.

Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.

He speculates that 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.

“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.”

But scientists call this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.”

Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).

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.2

Jump school is a place where testing is the principal instructional medium, and the test is in the doing.

Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do.

This process of converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain is still not perfectly understood. We call the process encoding, and we call the new representations within the brain memory traces.

The process of strengthening these mental representations for long-term memory is called consolidation.

Consolidation helps organize and solidify learning, and, notably, 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.

Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with us.

How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth.

This is why etymological vocabulary building is so effective.it gives your easy cues to retrieve the meanings. context based vocabulary bbuilding also occurs when we find a word five times in different contexts, we undersand the implied meaning. All children learn language through implied learning. Not through vocab and grammar classes.

Context can unleash memories, as when the right key works to open an old lock.

Here again we see the two familiar lessons. First, that some difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains—like spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice—will feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring. Second, that our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.

When it comes to learning and mastery, slow and steady wins the race. Deep Knowledge is what makes brilliant minds. Similar to the story of the hare and tortoise.

This paradox is at the heart of the concept of desirable difficulties in learning: the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it. In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.9

Mental models are forms of deeply entrenched and highly efficient skills (seeing and unloading on a curveball) or knowledge structures (a memorized sequence of chess moves) that, like habits, can be adapted and applied in varied circumstances.

The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation.