Make It Stick Quotes

“A group of fifth grade students are individually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar difficulty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90 percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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. These behaviors are what psychologists call “rule learning” and “structure building.” 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 lessons that can be applied later in similar situations. Likewise, people who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interests, and sense of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how we overcome our shortcomings. 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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The point is not to “slide your eyes over the words.” You start with questions, and you read for answers.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“For most of us who have found our way in the sciences,” Wenderoth says, “any time we fell, there was somebody around to help us up, or to say, ‘This is how you get up.’ You were taught that when things don’t go well, you keep working anyway. You persevere.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might be exercises that require students to wrestle with trying to solve a new kind of problem before coming to the class where the solution is taught; practice tests that students can download and use to review material and to calibrate their judgments of what they know and don’t know; writing exercises that require students to reflect on past lesson material and relate it to other knowledge or other aspects of their lives; exercises that require students to generate short statements that summarize the key ideas of recent material covered in a text or lecture. Make quizzing and practice exercises count toward the course grade, even if for very low stakes. Students in classes where practice exercises carry consequences for the course grade learn better than those in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences. Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“In particular, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these: •  Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered. •  When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten. •  Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability. •  You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around. •  To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability. •  Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the process of forgetting.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Always does the reading prior to a lecture •  Anticipates test questions and their answers as he reads •  Answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading •  Reviews study guides, finds terms he can’t recall or doesn’t know, and relearns those terms •  Copies bolded terms and their definitions into a reading notebook, making sure that he understands them •  Takes the practice test that is provided online by his professor; from this he discovers which concepts he doesn’t know and makes a point to learn them •  Reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his design •  Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them above his bed, and tests himself on them from time to time •  Spaces out his review and practice over the duration of the course”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Students use quizzes and practice tests to see whether they know as much as they think they do. It’s worth being explicit here about the importance of answering the questions in the quizzes that you give yourself. Too often we will look at a question on a practice test and say to ourselves: Yup, I know that, and then move down the page without making the effort to write in the answer. If you don’t supply the answer, you may be giving in to the illusion of knowing, when in fact you would have difficulty rendering an accurate or complete response. Treat practice tests as tests, check your answers, and focus your studying effort on the areas where you are not up to snuff.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Calibration is simply the act of using an objective instrument to clear away illusions and adjust your judgment to better reflect reality. The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“CALIBRATION is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“You can practice generation when reading new class material by trying to explain beforehand the key ideas you expect to find in the material and how you expect they will relate to your prior knowledge. Then read the material to see if you were correct. As a result of having made the initial effort, you will be more astute at gleaning the substance and relevance of the reading material, even if it differs from your expectation.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Experiential learning is a form of generation: you set out to accomplish a task, you encounter a problem, and you consult your creativity and storehouse of knowledge to try to solve it.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“the act of filling in a missing word in a text (that is, generating the word yourself rather than having it supplied by the writer) results in better learning and memory of the text than simply reading a complete text.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a metaphor or visual image for the new material.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application of it”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning