Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

No reader, when asked to account for the choices made under pressure by a novel’s protagonist, can keep her own life experience from shading her explanation of what must have ...

The psychologists Larry Jacoby, Bob Bjork, and Colleen Kelley, summing up studies on illusions of comprehension, competence, and remembering, write that it is nearly impossible to avoid basing one’s judgments on subjective experience.

It is a confounding paradox, then, that the changeable nature of our memory not only can skew our perceptions but also is essential to our ability to learn.

Memory has some similarities to a Google search algorithm, in the sense that the more you connect what you learn to what you already know, and the more associations you make to a memory (for example, linking it with a visual image, a place, or a larger story), then the more mental cues you have through which to find and retrieve the memory again later.

it serves you well to stay open to the fallibility of your certainties: even your most cherished memories may not represent events in the exact way they occurred.

People interpret a story in light of their world knowledge, imposing order where none had been present so as to make a more logical story.

People remember things that were implied but not specifically stated.

Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred.

Hypothetical events that are imagined vividly can seat themselves in the mind as firmly as memories of actual events.

What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.

Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content.

As discussed earlier, students who study by rereading their texts can mistake their fluency with a text, gained from rereading, for possession of accessible knowledge of the subject and consequently overestimate how well they will do on a test.

This process is called “memory conformity” or the “social contagion of memory”: one person’s error can “infect” another person’s memory.

false consensus effect.

Confidence in a memory is not a reliable indication of its accuracy.

remembered, but your memory of your personal circumstances surrounding the events may not necessarily be accurate.

The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it.

model. This presumption by the professor that her students will readily follow something complex that appears fundamental in her own mind is a metacognitive error, a misjudgment of the matchup between what she knows and what her students know.

The failure to recognize when your solution doesn’t fit the problem

is another form of faulty self-observation that can lead you into trouble.

Dada, we must cultivate the ability to discern when our mental models aren’t working: when a situation that seems familiar is actually different and requires that we reach for a different solution and do something new.

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.

Dunning-Kruger effect

incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch...

and what is desirable, see no need to t...

students who scored at the twelfth percentile on average believed that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the sixty-eighth percentile.

One is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others in everyday life, because people don’t like to deliver the bad news.

some people are just not astute at reading how other people are performing and are therefore less able to spot competence when they see it, making them less able to make comparative judgments of their own performance.

When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn’t, and we are easily misled.

For example, they need to test themselves, both to attain the direct benefits of increased retention and to determine what they know and don’t know to more accurately judge their progress and focus on material that needs more work.

It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit.

when students are presented with a body of material to master, say a stack of foreign vocabulary flashcards, and are free to decide when to drop a card out of the deck because they’ve learned it, most students drop the card when they’ve gotten it right once or twice, far sooner than they should.

The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confidence...

coach. Likewise, most students will learn academics better under an instructor who knows where improvement is needed and structures the practice required to achieve it.19

The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.

Doing cumulative quizzing, as Andy Sobel does in his political economics course, is especially powerful for consolidating learning and knitting the concepts from one stage of a course into new material encountered later.

As a learner, you can use any number of practice

techniques to self-test your mastery, from answering flashcards to explaining key concepts in your own words, and...

Don’t make the mistake of dropping material from your testing regime once you’ve gotten it correct a couple of times. If it’s important, it needs to be practiced, and practiced again. And don’t put stock in momentary gains that result from massed pr...

reveals students’ problems in reaching understanding; and provides opportunities for them to explain their understanding, receive feedback, and assess their learning compared to other students.

Mazur tries to pair students who initially

had different answers to a question so that they can see another point of view and try to convince one another of who is right.

Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not always a reliable indicator of learning. Neither is your level of ease in retrieving a fact or a phrase on a quiz shortly after encountering it in a lecture or text.

(Ease of retrieval after a delay, however, is a

good indicator of l...

Far better is to create a mental model of the material that integrates the various ideas across a text, connects them to what you already know, and enables you to draw inferences. How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension, because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your...

In many settings, your judgment and learning are calibrated by working alongside a more experienced partner: airline first officers with captains, rookies with seasoned cops, residents with experienced surgeons.

Training that simulates the kinds of demands and changeable conditions that can be expected in real-world settings helps learners and trainers assess mastery and focus on areas where understanding or competency need to be raised.

Sometimes the most powerful feedback for calibrating your sense of what you do and don’t know are the mistakes you make in the field, assuming you survive them and are receptive to the lesson.