Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Kim, who described for us how she prepares for her university-level exams in psychology. First, she pulls together all her material from lecture slides, her outside reading, and her notes. She reduces this material to key ideas—not whole sentences. These form the plan for her essay. Next she selects the site for her memory palace. She ties each key idea to a location in the palace that she can visualize in her mind’s eye. Then she populates each location with something crazy that will link her to one of the key ideas. When she sits in the exam hall and finds out the essay topics, she takes ten minutes to mentally walk through the relevant memory palaces and list the key ideas for each essay. If she’s forgotten a point, she moves on to the next one and fills in the blank later. Once the plan is sketched out, she sets to work, free of the stressful anxiety that she won’t remember what she’s learned under the pressure of getting it right.25