Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

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

First, to be useful, learning requires memory,

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

Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.

Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.

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

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

A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.

Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.

When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.

Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when er...

Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned.

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.

The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

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.

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

How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition.

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

People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class—you can burn it into memory. Not so.

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

Belief in the power of rereading, intentionality, and repetition is pervasive, but the truth is you usually can’t embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over.

multiple readings in close succession did not prove to be a potent study method for either group, at either school, in any of the conditions tested. In fact, the researchers found no rereading benefit at all under these conditions.

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

Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled.

The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.

Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in a 2002 press briefing about US intelligence on Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that 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.”

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

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

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

The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. 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. In effect, 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.

he practiced in his mind and in the operating room until it became the kind of reflexive maneuver you can depend on

To make sure the new learning is available when it’s needed, Ebersold points out, “you memorize the list of things that you need to worry about in a given situation: steps A, B, C, and D,” and you drill on them.

“Unless you keep recalling this maneuver, it will not become a reflex. Like a race car driver in a tight situation or a quarterback dodging a tackle, you’ve got to act out of reflex before you’ve even had time to think. Recalling it over and over, practicing it over and over. That’s just so important.”

a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.

Aristotle wrote: “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.”

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. Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved.

the brain acts before the mind has time to think.

“Once again, another author confuses learning with recalling information.” “I personally would like to avoid as many tests as possible, especially with my grade on the line. Trying to learn in a stressful environment is no way to help retain information.” “Nobody should care whether memorization is enhanced by practice testing or not. Our children cannot do much of anything anymore.”

Forget memorization, many commenters argued; education should be about high-order skills.

The best results were from those spending about 60 percent of the study time in recitation.

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.

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

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.”

One argument suggested that the greater effort required by the delayed recall solidified the memory better. Researchers began to ask whether the schedule of testing mattered. The answer is yes. When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.

Principal Chamberlain, when asked what he thought the study results indicated, replied simply: “Retrieval practice has a significant impact on kids’ learning. This is telling us that it’s valuable, and that teachers are well advised to incorporate it into their instructional technique.”

In motor learning, trial and error with delayed feedback is a more awkward but effective way of acquiring a skill than trial and correction through immediate feedback; immediate feedback is like the training wheels on a bicycle: the learner quickly comes to depend on the continued presence of the correction.