Make It Stick Quotes

“To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than reexposure to the original material does. This is the testing effect, also known as the retrieval-practice effect.3”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“the power of active retrieval—testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“how to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“creativity is more important than knowledge,”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“It makes sense to reread a text once if there’s been a meaningful lapse of time since the first reading, but doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming study strategy that yields negligible benefits at the expense of much more effective strategies that take less time.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“gains achieved during massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“when learning is hard, you’re doing important work. To understand that striving and setbacks, as in any action video game or new BMX bike stunt, are essential if you are to surpass your current level of performance toward true expertise. Making mistakes and correcting them builds”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“People do have multiple forms of intelligence to bring to bear on learning, and you learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“when we talk about learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“For success everything must go right, but by contrast, failure can be attributed to any number of external causes: it’s easy to blame the tool for what the hand cannot do.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

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

“People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“the expense of a larger grasp of context or creative ability; that testing creates extra stress for students and gives a false measure of ability; and so on. But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning—if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than “testing,” we open ourselves to another possibility: the use of testing as a tool for learning.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“first time and then waited some days before they reread it.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Researchers began to ask whether the schedule of testing mattered. The answer is yes. When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class—you can burn it into memory. Not so.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning