06 December 2018
Make It Stick
Make It Stick
The Science of Successful Learning
Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel

Highlights

Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.
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Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting.
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Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
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Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
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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.
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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.
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Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
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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.
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[O]ne cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.
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Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
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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.
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Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated.
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When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.
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Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention.
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The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not.
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Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility.
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[T]he better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it’s important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.
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Interleaving can also help you develop your ability to discriminate later between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions.
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It’s one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery.
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Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.
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[T]he easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less your retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it.
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Massed practice gives us the warm sensation of mastery because we’re looping information through short-term memory without having to reconstruct the learning from long-term memory.
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It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.
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Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).
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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.
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The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches.
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For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.
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One is that when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change. Another is that, as humans, we are readily misled by illusions, cognitive biases, and the stories we construct to explain the world around us and our place within it. To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.
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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.
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Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.
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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.
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[R]eflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and how might I do it differently next time helps me isolate key ideas, organize them into mental models, and apply them again in the future with an eye to improving and building on what I’ve learned.
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Knowledge is not knowhow until you understand the underlying principles at work and can fit them together into a structure larger than the sum of its parts. Knowhow is learning that enables you to go do.
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[T]he architecture and gross structure of the brain appear to be substantially determined by genes but that the fine structure of neural networks appears to be shaped by experience and to be capable of substantial modification.
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“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.”
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Learning, like writing, is an act of engagement.
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The six levels range from gaining knowledge (the most fundamental level) to developing comprehension of the underlying facts and ideas, being able to apply learning to solve problems, being able to analyze ideas and relationships so as to make inferences, being able to synthesize knowledge and ideas in new ways, and, at the most sophisticated level, being able to use learning to evaluate opinions and ideas and make judgments based on evidence and objective criteria.