Make It Stick Quotes

“We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“System 1 is powerful because it draws on our accumulated years of experience and our deep emotions. System 1 gives us the survival reflex in moments of danger, and the astonishing deftness earned through thousands of hours of deliberate practice in a chosen field of expertise. In the interplay between Systems 1 and 2—the topic of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink—your instantaneous ability to size up a situation plays against your capacity for skepticism and thoughtful analysis. Of course, when System 1’s conclusions arise out of misperception or illusion, they can steer you into trouble. Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence in the world at large and in any field where you want to be expert. It’s not just the dullards who fall victim. We all do, to varying degrees. Pilots, for example, are susceptible to a host of perceptual illusions. They are trained to beware of them and to use their instruments to know that they’re getting things right.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“System 1 is automatic and deeply influential, but it is susceptible to illusion, and you depend on System 2 to help you manage yourself: by checking your impulses, planning ahead, identifying choices, thinking through their implications, and staying in charge of your actions. When a guy in a restaurant walks past a mother with an infant and the infant cries out “Dada!” that’s System 1. When the blushing mother says, “No, dear, that’s not Dada, that’s a man,” she is acting as a surrogate System 2, helping the infant refine her System 1.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“We like to think we’re smarter than the average doodle, and even if we’re not, we feel affirmed in this delusion each year when the newest crop of Darwin Awards circulates by email, that short list of self-inflicted fatalities caused by spectacularly poor judgment, as in the case of the attorney in Toronto who was demonstrating the strength of the windows in his twenty-two-story office tower by throwing his shoulder against the glass when he broke it and fell through. The truth is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment. Good judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Intuitively it makes sense that difficulties that don’t strengthen the skills you will need, or the kinds of challenges you are likely to encounter in the real-world application of your learning, are not desirable. Having somebody whisper in your ear while you read the news may be essential training for a TV anchor. Being heckled by role-playing protestors while honing your campaign speech may help train up a politician. But neither of these difficulties is likely to be helpful for Rotary Club presidents or aspiring YouTube bloggers who want to improve their stage presence. A cub towboat pilot on the Mississippi might be required in training to push a string of high-riding empty barges into a lock against a strong side wind. A baseball player might practice hitting with a weight on his bat to strengthen his swing. You might teach a football player some of the principles of ballet for learning balance and movement, but you probably would not teach him the techniques for an effective golf drive or backhand tennis serve. Is there an overarching rule that determines the kinds of impediments that make learning stronger? Time and further research may yield an answer. But the kinds of difficulties we’ve just described, whose desirability is well documented, offer a large and diverse toolkit already at hand.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The whole idea of the testing effect is that you learn more by testing yourself than by rereading. Well, it’s very hard to get students to do that because they’ve been trained for so long to keep reading and reading the book.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

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

“Structure is all around us and available to us through the poet’s medium of metaphor.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“An apt analogy for how the brain consolidates new learning may be the experience of composing an essay. The first draft is rangy, imprecise. You discover what you want to say by trying to write it. After a couple of revisions you have sharpened the piece and cut away some of the extraneous points. You put it aside to let it ferment. When you pick it up again a day or two later, what you want to say has become clearer in your mind.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Simply including one test (retrieval practice) in a class yields a large improvement in final exam scores, and gains continue to increase as the frequency of classroom testing increases. Testing”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. 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

“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. Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. The need to understand that 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 the bridges to advanced learning.”
― 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. For instance, interleaving practice at computing the volumes of different kinds of geometric solids makes you more skilled at picking the right solution when a later test presents a random solid.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings. Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can’t advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and difficult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we’re still able to adapt.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“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

“PEOPLE GENERALLY ARE going about learning in the wrong ways. Empirical research into how we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how to learn turns out to be largely wasted effort. Even college and medical students—whose main job is learning—rely on study techniques that are far from optimal. At the same time, this field of research, which goes back 125 years but has been particularly fruitful in recent years, has yielded a body of insights that constitute a growing science of learning: highly effective, evidence-based strategies to replace less effective but widely accepted practices that are rooted in theory, lore, and intuition. But there’s a catch: the most effective learning strategies are not intuitive.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against creative thinking is a false choice”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“kind—perhaps an experience or a paper exam—shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill. Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques of effective learning. Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works better now but also, and especially, to where I still need more work.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“(Ease of retrieval after a delay, however, is a good indicator of learning.)”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we need to do better.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“We know that students need to take more control of their own learning by employing strategies like those we have discussed. For example, they need to test themselves, both to attain the direct benefits of increased retention and to determine what they know and don’t know to more accurately judge their progress and focus on material that needs more work. But few students practice these strategies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if they are to practice them effectively: It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confidence, they are not inclined to change their habits.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“But few students practice these strategies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if they are to practice them effectively: It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“students need to take more control of their own learning by employing strategies like those we have discussed. For example, they need to test themselves, both to attain the direct benefits of increased retention and to determine what they know and don’t know to more accurately judge their progress and focus on material that needs more work.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn’t, and we are easily misled.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.2”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“by spacing or interleaving the practice, retrieval is harder, your performance is less accomplished, and you feel let down, but your learning is deeper and you will retrieve it more easily in the future.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning