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.

Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.

prior exposure did not aid later recall. Mere repetition did not enhance learning.

the use of testing as a tool for learning.

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.

a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.2

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.

Students heard a story that named sixty concrete objects. Those students who were tested immediately after exposure recalled 53 percent of the objects on this initial test but only 39 percent a week later. On the other hand, a group of students who learned the same material but were not tested at all until a week later recalled 28 percent. Thus, taking a single test boosted performance by 11 percent after a week. But what effect would three immediate tests have relative to one? Another group of students were tested three times after initial exposure and a week later they were able to recall 53 percent of the objects—the same as on the initial test for the group receiving one test.

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

studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it’s broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out.

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

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.

Implicit memory is your automatic retrieval of past experience in interpreting a new one.

It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

“practice like you play and you will play like you practice.”

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.

you have to keep practicing the fundamentals from time to time, forever, so you keep them sharp, otherwise you’re cooked,

you need to change it up in practice because too much repetition is boring.

retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, reflection, and elaboration.

Leitner box. Think of it as a series of four file-card boxes. In the first are the study materials (be they musical scores, hockey moves, or Spanish vocabulary flashcards) that must be practiced frequently because you often make mistakes in them. In the second box are the cards you’re pretty good at, and that box gets practiced less often than the first, perhaps by a half. The cards in the third box are practiced less often than those in the second, and so on.

Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing.

Reflection is a form of retrieval practice

Encoding

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.

Consolidation

strengthening these mental representations for long-term

In consolidation, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces.

Retrieval

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.

because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.

our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.

the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.9

Massed practice gives us the warm sensation of mastery because we’re looping information through short-term memory without having to reconstruct the learning from long-term memory.

Yet when text on a page is slightly out of focus or presented in a font that is a little difficult to decipher, people recall the content better.

testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits.

It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.

retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material.

Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit.

One is that when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

his conscience was not his guide but his accomplice.)

Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions.

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.

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

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

Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know. Frequent

How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension, because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your own words, and explain why they are significant—how

where the competition isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take risks, be honest.

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”