Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal and the other processes of consolidation.

As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. 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 inference is that learning gained through the less challenging, massed form of practice is encoded in a simpler or comparatively impoverished representation than the learning gained from the varied and more challenging practice which demands more brain power and encodes the learning in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly.5

significant advantage of interleaving and variation is that they help us learn better how to assess context and discriminate between problems, selecting and applying the correct solution from a range of possibilities.

When you have learned under conditions of massed or blocked repetition, you have had no practice on that critical sorting process.

to sort out the relevant dimensions. The researchers were wrong. The commonalities among one painter’s works that the students learned through massed practice proved less useful than the differences between the works of multiple painters that the students learned through interleaving.

Even after they took the test and could have realized from their own performance that interleaving was the better strategy for learning, they clung to their belief that the concentrated viewing of paintings by one artist was better. The myths of massed practice are hard to exorcise, even when you’re experiencing the evidence yourself.7

Because rules for classification can only rely on these characteristic traits rather

than on defining traits (ones that hold for every member), bird classification is a matter of learning concepts and making judgments, not simply memorizing features.

Interleaved and variable practice proved more helpful than massed practice for learning the underlying concepts that unite and di...

Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function

together.

strategies of learning that help students identify and discern complex prototypes (family resemblances) can help them grasp the kinds of contextual and functional differences that go beyond the acquisition of simple forms of knowledge and reach into the higher sphere of comprehension.8

“The reason variety is important is it helps us see more nuances in the things that we can compare against,”

First—and this may seem self-evident: you do better on a test to demonstrate your competency at seeing patients in a clinic if your learning experience has involved seeing patients in a clinic.

the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later. It’s

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

placing too much emphasis on variety runs the risk of underemphasizing repeated retrieval practice on the basics—on the typical way the disease presents itself in most patients.

He speculates that 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.

Dooley believes that (1) you have to keep practicing the fundamentals from time to time, forever, so you keep them sharp, otherwise you’re cooked, but (2) you need to change it up in practice because too much repetition is boring. The position coaches work with players individually on specific skills

You start into the motion and say, ‘If they react like this, then this is what you would do.’ You practice adjustments. If you do it enough times in different situations, then you’re able to do it pretty well in whatever comes up on the field.”11

By reading the playbook, rehearsing it in your mind, maybe taking a step or two to walk through it, you simulate something happening. So that kind of rehearsal is added to what you get in the classroom and on the field.”

The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.

Sleep seems to play a large role in memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.

Leitner box.

Beware of the familiarity trap: the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it. This familiarity can hurt you during self-quizzing if you take shortcuts. Doug Larsen says, “You have to be disciplined to say, ‘All right, I’m going to make myself recall all of this and if I don’t, what did I miss, how did I not know that?’

In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete.

Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit.

But the experiences and learning that we want to salt away for the future must be made stronger and more durable—in

Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation.

As we’ve noted, sleep seems to help memory consolidation, but in any case, consolidation and transition of learning to long-term storage occurs over a period of time. An apt analogy for how the brain consolidates

Similarly, the process of learning something often starts out feeling disorganized and unwieldy; the most important aspects are not always salient. Consolidation helps organize and solidify learning,

act of retrieving a memory from long-term storage can both strengthen the memory traces and at the same time make them modifiable again, enabling them, for example, to connect to more recent learning. This process is called reconsolidation. This is how retrieval practice

when you let the memory recede a little, for example by spacing or interleaving the practice, retrieval is harder, your performance is less accomplished, and you feel let down, but

your learning is deeper and you will retrieve it more easily in the future.4

Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later.

Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with us.

if every memory were always readily to hand, you would have a hard time sorting through the sheer volume

of material to put your finger on the knowledge you need at the moment:

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.

Knowledge that is well entrenched, like real fluency in French or years of experience driving on the right side of the road, is easily relearned later, after a period of disuse or after being interrupted by competition for retrieval cues.

It’s not the knowledge itself that has been forgotten, but the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it.

The paradox is that some forgetting is often essential for new learning.6 When you change from a PC to a Mac, or from one Windows platform to another, you have to do enormous forgetting in order to learn the architecture of the new system and become adept at manipulating it so readily that your attention

you may have to forget the cues to a complex body of learning that you possess if you are to acquire a new one.

It is a critical point that as you learn new things, you don’t lose from long-term memory most of what you have learned well in life; rather, through disuse or the reassignment of cues, you forget

it in the sense that you’re unable to call it up easily.

This chain of perceptions and responses must be so deeply entrenched as to become automatic, because the ball is in the catcher’s mitt long before you can even begin to think your way through how to connect with it.

At the end of the forty-five swings, he was still struggling somewhat to connect with the ball. These players didn’t seem to be developing the proficiency their teammates were showing. The interleaving and spacing of different pitches made learning more arduous and feel slower.

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

This paradox is at the heart of the concept of desirable difficulties in learning: the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it.