Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fits those preferences. Yet there are other kinds of differences in how people learn that do matter.

As he throws himself into one scheme after another, he draws lessons that improve his focus and judgment.

He knits what he learns into mental models of investing, which he then uses to size up more complex opportunities and find his way through the weeds, plucking the telling details from masses of irrelevant information to reach the payoff at the end.

People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer les...

building his own set of rules for what makes an investment opportunity attractive, stitching the rules into a template, and then finding new and different ways to apply it.

When he is asked how he accounts for his success, the lessons he cites are deceptively simple: go where the competition isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take risks, be honest.

As the

story of Bruce makes clear, some learning differences matter more than others. But which differences? That’s what we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter.

One difference that appears to matter a lot is how you see yoursel...

the way you understand your place in the world likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the subsequent paths you take.

Some of these differences matter a lot—for example, our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures. Other differences we may think count for a lot, for example having a verbal or visual learning style, actually don’t.

Neurologists and psychologists emphasize the importance of diagnosing dyslexia early and working with children before the third grade while the brain is still quite plastic and potentially more malleable, enabling the rerouting of neural circuits.

high achievers interviewed for the Fortune article argue that some people with dyslexia seem to possess, or to develop, a greater capacity for creativity and problem solving, whether as a result of their neural wiring or the necessity

they face to find ways to compensate for their disability. To succeed,

Experiments by Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that individuals with dyslexia do poorly at interpreting information in their visual field of focus when compared to those without dyslexia.

However, they significantly outperform others in their ability to interpret information

from their peripheral vision, suggesting that a superior ability to grasp the big picture might have its origins...

When instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their differing preferences for how the material is taught.

Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience.

Howard Gardner to

Unlike learning styles, which can have the perverse effect of causing individuals to perceive their learning abilities as limited, multiple intelligences theory elevates the sheer variety of tools in our native toolkit.

First, traditional measures of intelligence failed to account for environmental differences; there is no reason to suspect that kids who excelled at informal, indigenous knowledge can’t catch up to or even surpass their peers in academic

learning when given the appropriate opportunities.

In Sternberg’s view, we’re all in a state of developing expertise, and any test that measures only what we know at any given moment is a static measure that tells us nothing about our potential in the realm the test measures.

Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in a particular situation is not measured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies.

determining the state of one’s expertise; refocusing learning on areas of low performance; follow-up testing to measure the improvement and to refocus learning so as to keep raising expertise.

Thus, a test may assess a weakness, but rather than assuming

that the weakness indicates a fixed inability, you interpret it as a lack of skill or know...

It focuses the learner and teacher on areas that need to be brought up rather than on areas of accomplishment, and the ability to measure a learner’s progress from one test to the next prov...

what do I need to learn in order to improve? That is, where aptitude tests and much of learning styles theory tend to emphasize our strengths and encourage us to focus on them, dynamic testing helps us to discover our weaknesses and correct them.

structure building: the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them.

High structure-builders learn new material better than low structure-builders.

The latter have difficulty setting aside irrelevant or competing information, and as a result they tend to hang on to too many concepts to be condensed into a workable model (or overall structure)...

High structure-builders develop the skill to identify

foundational concepts and their key building blocks and to sort new information based on whether it adds to the larger structure and one’s knowledge or is extraneous and can be put aside.

By contrast, low structure-builders struggle in figuring out and sticking with an overarching structure and knowing what information needs to fit...

stuff fits or it doesn’t; it adds nuance, capacity and meaning, or it obs...

We know that when questions are embedded in texts to help focus readers on the main ideas, the learning performance of low structure-builders improves to a level commensurate with high structure-builders.

The embedded questions promote a more coherent representation of the text than low-structure readers can build on their own, thus bringing them

up toward the level achieved by the high stru...

that cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a story, strengthens learning.

that reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and how might I do it differently next time helps me isolate key ideas, organize them into mental models, and apply them again in

the future with an eye to improving and building on wh...

rule learners tend to abstract the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate the examples being studied.

Example learners tend to memorize the examples rather than the underlying principles.

When they encounter an unfamiliar case, they lack a grasp of the rules needed to classify or solve it, so they generalize from the nearest example they can remember, even if it is not particularly relevant to the new case.

However, example learners may improve at extracting underlying rules when they are asked to compare two different examples rather than fo...

Here’s the payoff: after figuring out this common, underlying solution, students are then able to go on to solve a variety

we know that high structure-builders and rule learners are more successful in transferring their learning to unfamiliar situations than are low structure-builders and example learners.

Knowledge is not knowhow until you understand the underlying principles at work and can fit them together into