Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.9

you “reload” or reconstruct the components of the skill or material anew from long-term memory rather than mindlessly repeating them from short-term memory.

But just as with rereading as a study strategy, the fluency gained through massed practice is transitory, and our sense of mastery is illusory.

mimicking the challenges of practical experience, these learning strategies conform to the admonition to “practice like you play, and you’ll play like you practice,” improving what scientists call transfer of learning, which is the ability to apply what you’ve learned in new settings.

turns out that when the outline of a lecture proceeds in a different order from the textbook passage, the effort to discern the main ideas and reconcile the discrepancy produces better recall of the content.

In all of these examples, the change from normal presentation introduces a difficulty—disruption of fluency—that makes the learner work harder to construct an interpretation that makes sense.

generation

Even if you’re being quizzed on material you’re familiar with, the simple act of filling in a blank has the effect of strengthening your memory of the material and your ability to recall it later.

When you’re asked to supply an answer or a solution to something that’s new to you, the power of generation to aid learning is even more evident.

It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.14

generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).

Since those days we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material.

“Working memory” refers to the amount of information you can hold in mind while working through a problem, especially in the face of distraction.

The results support the finding that difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”17

Anders Ericsson’s work investigating the nature of expert performance shows that to achieve expertise requires thousands of hours of dedicated practice in which one strives to surpass one’s current level of ability, a process in which failure becomes an essential experience on the path to mastery.

Festival organizers argued that modern society’s focus on showing results has led to a culture of intellectual timorousness, starving the kind of intellectual ferment and risk-taking that produced the great discoveries that mark French history.

Thomas Edison called failure the source of inspiration, and is said to have remarked, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He argued that perseverance in the face of failure is the key to success.

didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon-fed the solution, even if we fall short in our first attempts at an answer.

“Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have figured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into. For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.”18

In calling herself the Blundering Gardener, she is giving herself and us, her readers, permission to make mistakes and get on with it.

She is retrieving the details and the story of what she has discovered—say, about an experiment in grafting two species of fruit trees—and then she is elaborating by explaining the experience to her readers, connecting the outcome to what she already knows about the subject or has learned as a result.

“Look, blundering’s really not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that you get stuff done. A lot of people, when they contemplate the enormity of the task and they see all that’s entailed, they’re stopped in their tracks.”

“desirable difficulties,” write that difficulties are desirable because “they trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering.

If, however, the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully, they become undesirable difficulties.”

Outlining a lesson in a sequence different from the one in the textbook is not a desirable difficulty for learners who lack the reading skills or language fluency required to hold a train of thought long enough to reconcile the discrepancy.

desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.

Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know.

Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge.

and on your establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories.

Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit.

Repeated effortful recall or practice helps integrate learning into mental models, in which a set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills are fused into a meaningful whole that can be adapted and applied in later settings.

When practice conditions are varied or retrieval is interleaved with the practice of other material, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction and the versatility with which we can apply the learning in new settings at a later date.

Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.

Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for “about”). Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us to stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don’t know when we’ve got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.

One is that when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change. Another is that, as humans, we are readily misled by illusions, cognitive biases, and the stories we construct to explain the world around us and our place within it.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

We also use it to train System 1 to recognize and respond to particular situations that demand reflexive action.

System 1 is automatic and deeply influential, but it is susceptible to illusion, and you depend on System 2 to help you manage yourself: by checking your impulses, planning ahead, identifying choices, thinking through their implications, and staying in charge of your actions.

Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence in the world at large and in any field where you want to be expert.

Pilots, for example, are susceptible to a host of perceptual illusions. They are trained to beware of them and to use their instruments to know that they’re getting things right.

Rather than following prescribed procedure, and rather than fully engaging his System 2 analytic resources by monitoring all his instruments, he let himself become preoccupied with the engine restart and with a single flight indicator, airspeed.

but the National Transportation Safety Board report of that incident reveals just how quickly training and professionalism can be hijacked by System 1 illusion, and therefore why we need to cultivate a disciplined System 2, conscious analysis and reasoning, that always keeps one eye on the flight instruments.3

“sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones.”

There are many ways that our System 1 and System 2 judgments can be led astray: perceptual illusions like those experienced by pilots, faulty narrative, distortions of memory, failure to recognize when a new kind of problem requires a new kind of solution, and a variety of cognitive biases to which we’re prone.

Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events.

The results showed that overhearing one side of a conversation proved more distracting than overhearing both sides, and the content of those partial conversations was better recalled later by the unintentional eavesdroppers.

As the authors point out, the study may help explain why we find one-sided cell phone conversations in public spaces so intrusive, but it also reveals the ineluctable way we are drawn to imbue the events around us with rational explanations.

in our need for a rational understanding of our own lives. We strive to fit the events of our lives into a cohesive story that accounts for our circumstances, the things that befall us, and the choices we make.

In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered.