Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

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

spacing practice improves retention.

retrieving a memory changes the memory, making it easier to retrieve again later.

retrieval practice can make information more accessible when it is needed in various contexts.

Frequent low-stakes testing helps dial down test anxiety among students by diversifying the consequences over a much larger sample: no single test is a make-or-break event. And this kind of testing enables instructors to identify gaps in students’ understanding and adapt their instruction to fill them.

Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention.

Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention.

when the mind has to work, learning sticks better. The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval.

Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.

Students who take practice tests have a better grasp of their progress than those who simply reread the material.

Giving students corrective feedback after tests keeps them from incorrectly retaining material they have misunderstood and produces better learning of the correct answers.

Researchers call this kind of practice “massed,” and our faith rests in large part on the simple fact that when we do it, we can see it making a difference. Nevertheless, despite what our eyes tell us, this faith is misplaced.

The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not. Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice.

Why is spaced practice more effective than massed practice? It appears that 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. Rapid-fire practice leans on short-term memory. Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal and the other processes of consolidation. Hence, spaced practice works better.

What would interleaved practice look like? You practice procedure 1 just a few times, then switch to procedure 4, then switch to 3, then to 7, and so on.

The beanbag study focused on mastery of motor skills, but much evidence has shown that the underlying principle applies to cognitive learning as well. 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. You develop a broader understanding of the relationships between different conditions and the movements required to succeed in them; you discern context better and develop a more flexible “movement vocabulary”—different movements for different situations.

this is the way life usually unfolds: problems and opportunities come at us unpredictably, out of sequence. For our learning to have practical value, we must be adept at discerning “What kind of problem is this?” so we can select and apply an appropriate solution.

Interleaving enabled better discrimination and produced better scores on a later test that required matching the works with their painters. The interleaving group was also better able to match painters’ names correctly to new examples of their work that the group had never viewed during the learning phase.

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

First—and this may seem self-evident: you do better on a test to demonstrate your competency at seeing patients in a clinic if your learning experience has involved seeing patients in a clinic.

the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later. It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

repeated retrieval practice is crucial to long-term retention, and it’s a critical aspect of training.”

“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.”

(1) you have to keep practicing the fundamentals from time to time, forever, so you keep them sharp, otherwise you’re cooked, but (2) you need to change it up in practice because too much repetition is boring. The position coaches work with players individually on specific skills and then on how they’re playing their positions during team practice.

The brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns you’ve observed. 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. New learning is labile: its meaning is not fully formed and therefore is easily altered. In consolidation, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces. This may occur over several hours or longer and involves deep processing of the new material, during which scientists believe that the brain replays or rehearses the learning, giving it meaning, filling in blank spots, and making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory.

Learning, remembering, and forgetting work together in interesting ways. Durable, robust learning requires that we do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short-term memory into long-term memory, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked. The task is more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is just as important.

With enough effortful practice, a complex set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills fuse into a meaningful whole, forming a mental model somewhat akin to a “brain app”.

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 taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as reflection. After a lecture or reading assignment, for example, you might ask yourself: What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know?

Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).

“write to learn.”

the process of trying to solve a problem without the benefit of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling it. Generation is another name for old-fashioned trial and error.

Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge.

Periodic retrieval of learning helps strengthen connections to the memory and the cues for recalling it, while also weakening routes to competing memories. Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit.

Repeated effortful recall or practice helps integrate learning into mental models, in which a set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills are fused into a meaningful whole that can be adapted and applied in later settings.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

System 1 (or the automatic system) is unconscious, intuitive, and immediate.

System 2 (the controlled system) is our slower process of conscious analysis and reasoning.

System 1 is automatic and deeply influential, but it is susceptible to illusion, and you depend on System 2 to help you manage yourself: by checking your impulses, planning ahead, identifying choices, thinking through their implications, and staying in

charge of your actions.

Memory can be distorted in many ways. People interpret a story in light of their world knowledge, imposing order where none had been present so as to make a more logical story. Memory is a reconstruction. We cannot remember every aspect of an event, so we remember those elements that have greatest emotional significance for us, and we fill in the gaps with details of our own that are consistent with our narrative but may be wrong.

Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred.

Interference from other events can distort memory.

Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content.

Our memories are also subject to social influence and tend to align with the memories of the people around us. If you are in a group reminiscing about past experiences and someone adds a wrong detail about the story, you will tend to incorporate this detail into your own memory and later remember the experience with the erroneous detail. This process is called “memory conformity” or the “social contagion of memory”: one person’s error can “infect” another person’s memory.

Be the one in charge.

Embrace the notion of successful intelligence.

Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive.