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spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.
If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better. Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence.
learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.
We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.
Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example.
Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
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.
Interleaving the identification of bird types or the works of oil painters improves your ability both to learn the unifying attributes within a type and to differentiate between types, improving your skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later.
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.
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn.
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.
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.
Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
What’s the conclusion? It makes sense to reread a text once if there’s been a meaningful lapse of time since the first reading, but doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming study strategy that yields negligible benefits at the expense of much more effective strategies that take less time.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
In 2010 the New York Times reported on a scientific study that showed that students who read a passage of text and then took a test asking them to recall what they had read retained an astonishing 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who had not been tested.
A second landmark study, published in 1939, tested over three thousand sixth graders across Iowa. The kids studied six-hundred-word articles and then took tests at various times before a final test two months later. 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
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.
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.
After an initial test, delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort.
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.
While practicing is vital to learning and memory, studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it’s broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out.
Interleaving the practice of two or more subjects or skills is also a more potent alternative to massed practice, and here’s a quick example of that.
Students find it confusing: they’re just starting to get a handle on new material and don’t feel on top of it yet when they are forced to switch. But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it.
The evidence favoring variable training has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies that suggest that different kinds of practice engage different parts of the brain.
The same benefits will apply whether you are practicing to identify tree species, differentiate the principles of case law, or master a new computer program.6
The underlying idea is simply that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it’s important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.
Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing. Interleaving can also help you develop your ability to discriminate later between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions.
Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit. Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep, and durable learning, what in motor skills shows up as underlying habit strength.
Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives.
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
It’s one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery. 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. When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it.
In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.
Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory. 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.5
Psychologists have uncovered a curious inverse relationship between the ease of retrieval practice and the power of that practice to entrench learning: the easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less your retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it.
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?
One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.” In essence, students reflect on a recent class topic in a brief writing assignment, where they may express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other concepts covered in class, or perhaps outside class.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the psychologist B. F. Skinner advocated the adoption of “errorless learning” methods in education in the belief that errors by learners are counterproductive and result from faulty instruction.
Failure underlies the scientific method, which has advanced our understanding of the world we inhabit. The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning.
As we said earlier, 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.
