Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

a structure larger than the sum of its parts. Knowhow is learning that enables you to go do.

The same goes for learning: you have to suit up, get out the door, and find what you’re after. Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest.

Go wide: don’t roost in a pigeonhole of your preferred learning style but take command of your resources and tap all of your “intelligences” to master the knowledge or skill you want to possess.

Describe what you want to know, do, or accomplish. Then list the competencies required, what you need to learn, and where you can find the knowledge or skill. Then go get

it.

Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia who have become high achievers, develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.

Don’t assume that you’re doing something wrong if the learning feels hard. Remember that difficulties you can overcome with greater cognitive effort will more than repay you in the depth and durability of your learning.

Are the differences such that they require different solutions, or are the similarities such that they respond to a common solution?

If you think you are a low structure-builder or an example learner trying to learn new material, pause periodically and ask what the central ideas are, what the rules are.

What kind of scaffold or framework can you imagine that holds these central ideas together?

By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.

A series of follow-up studies, the most recent in 2011, found that the nursery school children who had been more successful in delaying gratification in this exercise grew up to be more successful in school and in their careers.

We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self-discipline, which are the offspring of motivation and one’s sense of personal empowerment.

With mnemonics James had figured to pocket some easy facts to ace his exams without spending the time and effort to fully master the material, but he discovered something entirely different, as we will recount shortly.

When people suffer brain damage from strokes or accidents, scientists have seen the brain somehow reassign duties so that adjacent networks of neurons take over the work of damaged areas, enabling people to regain lost capacities.

A plateau period follows that lasts until around puberty, whereupon this overabundance begins to decline as the brain goes through a period of synaptic pruning.

“While children’s brains acquire a tremendous amount of information during the early years,” the neuroscientist Patricia Goldman-Rakic told the Education Commission of the States, most learning is acquired after synaptic formation stabilizes.

concluded that the architecture and gross structure of the brain appear to be substantially determined by genes but that the fine structure of neural networks appears to be shaped by experience and to be capable of substantial modification.

Neural cell bodies make up most of the part of our brains that scientists call the gray matter.

What they call the white matter is made up of the wiring: the axons that connect to dendrites of other neural cell bodies, and the waxy myelin sheaths in which some axons are wrapped, like the plastic coating on a lamp cord.

This rise in neurogenesis starts before the new learning activity is undertaken, suggesting the brain’s intention to learn, and continues for a period after the learning activity, suggesting that neurogenesis plays a role in the consolidation of memory and the beneficial effects that spaced and effortful retrieval practice have on long-term retention.9

The fact that retrieval practice, spacing, rehearsal, rule learning, and the construction of mental models improve learning and memory is evidence of neuroplasticity and is consistent with scientists’ understanding of memory consolidation as an agent for increasing and strengthening the neural pathways by which one is later able to retrieve and apply learning.

human intellectual development is “a lifelong dialogue between inherited tendencies and our life history.”10 The nature of that dialogue is the central question we explore in the rest of this chapter.

Certain fatty acids provide building blocks for nerve cell development that the body cannot produce by itself, and the theory behind the results is that these supplements support the creation of new synapses.

A key determiner of fluid intelligence is the capacity of a person’s working memory—the number of new ideas and

relationships that a person can hold in

mind while working through a problem (especially with some amo...

Learning and memory strategies such as retrieval practice and the building of mental models are effective for enhancing intellectual abilities in the material or skills practiced, but the benefits don’t extend to mastery of other material or skills.

To the extent that “brain training” improves one’s efficacy and self-confidence, as the purveyors claim, the benefits are more likely the fruits of better habits, such as learning how to focus attention and persist at practice.

are there strategies or behaviors that can serve as cognitive “multipliers” to amp up the performance of the intelligence I’ve already got? Yes. Here are three: embracing a growth mindset, practicing like an expert, and constructing memory cues.

Those who interpret failure as the result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.

People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet. You want to look smart,

so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder.

“If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck says. Learning goals trigger entirely ...

A focus on performance instead of on learning and growing causes people to hold back from risk taking or exposing their self-image to ridicule by putting themselves into situations where they have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome.

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”18

focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, visionary moves that lead to greatness.

Failure, as Carol Dweck tells us, gives you useful information, and the opportunity to discover what you’re capable of doing when

you really set your m...

that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success.

The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your

Whatever the field, expert performance is thought to be garnered through the slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations.

When Michelangelo finally completed painting over 400 life size figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” What appeared to his admirers to have flowed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20

Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learners it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of performance that need to be improved,

help focus attention on specific aspects, and provide feedback to keep perceptio...

One reason that experts are sometimes perceived to possess an uncanny talent is that some can observe a complex performance in their field and later reconstruct from memory every aspect of that performance, in granular detail.

Ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the average time the people Ericsson studied had invested to become expert in their fields, and the best among them had spent the larger percentage of those hours in solitary, deliberate practice.

A memory palace is a more complex type of mnemonic device that is useful

for organizing and holding larger volumes of material in memory.