Make It Stick Quotes

“I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored. It’s true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, reflection, and elaboration.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later. It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. 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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. 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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.”
― 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.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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 in the brain’s synaptic wiring.4”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Presumably, those overhearing half a conversation were strongly compelled to try to infer the missing half in a way that made for a complete narrative. As the authors point out, the study may help explain why we find one-sided cell phone conversations in public spaces so intrusive, but it also reveals the ineluctable way we are drawn to imbue the events around us with rational explanations.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Summary sheets.   Every Monday, Wenderoth’s students are required to turn in a single sheet of certain dimensions on which they have illustrated the prior week’s material in drawings annotated with key ideas, arrows, and graphs. She’s teaching physiology, which is about how things work, so the summaries take on the form of large cartoons dense with callouts, blowups, directional arrows, and the like. The sheets help her students synthesize a week’s information, thinking through how systems are connected: “This is causing this, which causes this, which feeds back on those. We use a lot of arrows in physiology. The students can work with each other, I don’t care. The sheet they bring in just has to be their own.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “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”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Dweck’s work shows that people who believe that their intellectual ability is fixed from birth, wired in their genes, tend to avoid challenges at which they may not succeed, because failure would appear to be an indication of lesser native ability. By contrast, people who are helped to understand that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control, are more likely to tackle difficult challenges and persist at them. They view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the road rather than as a measure of inability and the end of the road.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us. When we have reliable reference points, like cockpit instruments, and make a habit of checking them, we can make good decisions about where to focus our efforts, recognize when we’ve lost our bearings, and find our way back again.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Humans do not give greater credence to an objective record of a past event than to their subjective remembering of it, and we are surprisingly insensitive to the ways our particular construals of a situation are unique to ourselves. Thus the narrative of memory becomes central to our intuitions regarding the judgments we make and the actions we take. 5”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“In his interview with Errol Morris, the psychologist David Dunning argues that the path to self-insight leads through other people. “So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. ‘I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on.’ ” Think of the kids lining up to join the softball team—would you be picked?”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as reflection. After a lecture or reading assignment, for example, you might ask yourself: What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? Following an experience where you are practicing new knowledge or skills, you might ask: What went well? What could have gone better? What might I need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might I use the next time to get better results?”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do. When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“While cramming can produce better scores on an immediate exam, the advantage quickly fades because there is much greater forgetting after rereading than after retrieval practice. The benefits of retrieval practice are long-term.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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

“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

“The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“a failure to know the areas where their learning is weak—that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge—and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery.11”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning