Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better. Similarly,

Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research.

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

thought of #econbeats and #econselfie

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.

Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

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

Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them.

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

But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning—if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than “testing,” we open ourselves to another possibility: the use of testing as a tool for learning.

to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on.

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.

Since as far back as 1885, psychologists have been plotting “forgetting curves” that illustrate just how fast our cranberries slip off the string. In very short order we lose something like 70 percent of what we’ve just heard or read. After that, forgetting begins to slow, and the last 30 percent or so falls away more slowly, but the lesson is clear: a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.

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 experiment showed a couple of interesting results: the longer the first test was delayed, the greater the forgetting, and second, once a student had taken a test, the forgetting nearly stopped, and the student’s score on subsequent tests dropped very little.5

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.

In the classroom, delayed feedback also yields better long-term learning than immediate feedback does.

bowline. You put a small loop in the rope and then take the short end and draw it through, silently reciting the little memory device you were given: the rabbit comes up from his hole, goes around the tree, and goes back down. Retrieval again.

The paradox is that some forgetting is often essential for new learning.6

the easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less your retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it. Conversely, the more effort you have to expend to retrieve knowledge or skill, the more the practice of retrieval will entrench it.

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.

Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot.