Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

the most effective learning strategies are not intuitive.

spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.

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, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can’t advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and difficult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we’re still able to adapt. If you’re good at learning, you have an advantage in life. Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.

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.

Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.

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

interleave the practice of two or more subjects,

Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

you learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.

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.

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.

If you’re just engaging in mechanical repetition, it’s true, you quickly hit the limit of what you can keep in mind.

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 y...

where your sweat disappears even before your skin feels damp.

Likewise, if you’re trying to learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum, it’s easier when you ground it in something concrete that you already know, like the way a figure skater’s rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest.

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.

but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create.

Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy.

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

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

when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

Our faith in this runs deep, because most of us see fast gains during the learning phase of massed practice. What’s

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.

“fire hose”

“memory action items”—actions

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

standard operating procedures,

even years of repetitive exposure did not result in his learning where to grab the closest extinguisher if his wastebasket caught fire.7

Endel Tulving

However, on a delayed test the benefit of immediate rereading had worn off,

and the rereaders performed at the same level as the one-time readers.

In fact, the researchers found no rereading benefit at all under these conditions.

Yet surveys of college students confirm what professors have long known: highlighting, underlining, and sustained poring over notes and texts are the most-used study strategies, by far.10

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

Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each chapter to test himself?

Could he look at a concept like “conditioned stimulus,” define it, and use it in a paragraph?

While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried t...

Had he at least rephrased the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he ...

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.

“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.”

the ease with which they follow the argument gives them the feeling that they already know it and don’t need to study it.

a failure to know the areas where their learning is weak—that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge—and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery.

Notwithstanding the pitfalls of standardized testing, what we really ought to ask is how to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving.

Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up a house. Building the house requires not only knowledge of countless different fittings and materials but conceptual understanding, too, of aspects like the load-bearing properties of a header or roof truss system, or the principles of energy transfer and conservation that will keep the house warm but the roof deck cold so the owner doesn’t call

six months later with ice dam problems. Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.

and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit.