Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

The features of your home can be associated with a countless number

visual cues for retrieving memories later, when you simply take an imaginary walk through the house.

Humans remember pictures more easily than words. (For example, the image of an elephant is easier to recall than the word “elephant.”) So it stands to reason that associating vivid mental images with verbal or abstract material makes that material easier to retrieve from memory.

Images cue memories.

A song that you know well can provide a mnemonic structure, linking the lyrics in each musical phrase to an image that will cue retrieval of the desired memory.

traditional poems and songs seem to have been used as mnemonic devices for sending messages accurately over vast distances, from China at one end of the empire to Europe at the other end.

Many students who reach this point simply freeze. Despite being well grounded in their material, the stakes at play can make their minds go blank the moment they confront the empty exam booklet and the proctor’s ticking clock. That’s where having taken the time to construct a memory palace proves as good as gold.

Kim, who described for us how she prepares for her university-level exams in psychology. First, she pulls together all her material from lecture slides, her outside reading, and her notes. She reduces this material to key ideas—not whole sentences. These form the plan for her essay. Next she selects the site for her memory palace. She ties each key idea to a location in the palace that she can visualize in her mind’s eye. Then she populates each location with something crazy that will link her to one of the key ideas. When she sits in the exam hall and finds out the essay topics, she takes ten minutes to mentally walk through the relevant memory palaces and list the key ideas for each essay. If she’s forgotten a point, she moves on to the next one and fills in the blank later. Once the plan is sketched out, she sets to work, free of the stressful anxiety that she won’t remember what she’s learned under the pressure of getting it right.25

The memory palace serves not as a learning tool but as a method to organize what’s already been learned so as to be readily retrievable at essay time. This is a key point and helps to overcome the typical criticism that mnemonics are only useful in rote memorization. To the contrary, when used properly, mnemonics can help organize large bodies of knowledge to permit their ready retrieval.

Moonwalking with Einstein.

tools. For example, just as the peg method involves memorizing an image for the digits 1 through 10 (1 is bun, 2 is shoe, etc.), in order to remember much longer strings of digits, Paterson has committed to memory a unique image for every numeral from 0 to 1,000. This kind of achievement takes long hours of practice and intense focus—the kind of solitary striving that Anders Ericsson tells us characterizes the acquisition of expertise. The thousand images locked into memory took Paterson a year to master, fitted in between the other demands of family, work, and friends.

Without mnemonic tools, the maximum number of digits most people can hold in working memory is about seven. That is why local telephone numbers were designed to be no more than seven digits long.

Mnemonic devices are sometimes discounted as tricks of memory, not tools that fundamentally add to learning, and in a sense this is correct. The value of mnemonics to raise intellectual abilities comes after mastery of new material, as the students at Bellerbys are using them: as handy mental pockets for filing what they’ve learned,

and linking the main ideas in each pocket to vivid memory cues so that they can readily bring them to mind and retrieve the associated concepts and details, in depth, at the unexpected moments that the need arises.

With continued retrieval, complex material can become second nature to a person and the mnemonic cues are no longer needed: you consolidate concepts like Newton’s 3 laws of motion into mental models that you use as a kind of shorthand. Through repeated use, your brain encodes and “chunks” sequences of motor and cognitive actions, and your ability to recall and apply them becomes as automatic as habit.

And it comes down to the simple fact that the path to complex mastery or expert performance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self-discipline, grit, and persistence; with these qualities in healthy measure, if you want to become an expert, you probably can. And whatever you are striving to master, whether it’s a poem you wrote for a friend’s birthday, the concept of classical conditioning in psychology, or the second violin part in Hayden’s Fifth Symphony, conscious mnemonic devices can help to organize and cue the learning for ready retrieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that characterize expert performance.

Remember that the most successful students are those who

take

charge of their own learning and follow a simple but dis...

Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connections, building mental models, increasing your capability. The implication of this is powerful: Your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control. Knowing that this is so makes the difficulties worth tackling.

Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory What does this mean? “Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing. Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading.

How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already

k...

Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course, both the current week’s work and material covered in prior weeks.

When you quiz yourself, check your answers to make sure that your judgments of what you know and don’t know are accurate.

Making

errors will not set you back, so long as you check your answers and correct your mistakes.

Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.

Moreover, quizzing arrests forgetting. Forgetting is human nature, but practice at recalling new learning secures it in memory and helps you recall it in the future.

knowledge. A habit of regular retrieval practice throughout the duration of a course puts an end to cramming and all-nighters. You will need little studying at exam time. Reviewing the material the night before is much easier than learning

How it feels: Compared to rereading, self-quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels. But what you don’t sense when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it.

Another way of spacing retrieval practice is to interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it.

It feels like you’re not really getting on top of it, whereas in fact, quite the opposite is happening: As you reconstruct learning from long-term memory, as awkward as it feels, you are strengthening your mastery as

well as the memory.

What does this mean? If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions. If you are studying biology specimens, Dutch painters, or the principles of macroeconomics, mix up the examples.

When you structure your study regimen, once you reach the point where you understand a new problem type and its solution but your grasp of it is still rudimentary, scatter this problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you are alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each.

If you find yourself falling into single-minded, repetitive practice of a particular topic or skill, change it up: mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution.

But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter.

Why interleaved practice is better: Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify

the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real-world settings where you must discern the kind of problem you’re trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution.

How it feels: Blocked practice—that is, mastering all of one type of problem before progressing to practice another type—feels (and looks) like you’re getting better mastery as you go, whereas interrupting the study of one type to practice a different type feels disruptive and counterproductive. Even when learners achieve superior mastery from interleaved practice, they persist in feeling that blocked practice serves them better. You may also experience this feeling, but you now have the advantage of knowing

that studies show that this feeling is illusory.

ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application

What is it? Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.

For instance: Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how ...

structure of an atom, your physics teacher may have used the analogy of the solar system with the sun as the nucleus and electrons spinning around like planets.

The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know,

the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you cre...

Students are asked to illustrate on a single sheet the various biological systems studied during the week and to show graphically and through key words how the systems

interrelate with each other.