Make It Stick- The Science of Successful Learning

Preface

This book is about how individuals can learn better and remember longer. It is written by two cognitive scientists and a storyteller and inspired by a collaboration among eleven cognitive psychologists.

Two of us, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, are cognitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study of learning and memory. Peter Brown is a storyteller. We have teamed up to explain how learning and memory work, and we do this less by reciting the research than by telling stories of people who have found their way to mastery of complex knowledge and skills. Through these examples we illuminate the principles of learning that the research shows are highly effective. This book arose in part from a collaboration among eleven cognitive psychologists.

This is a book about what people can do for themselves right now in order to learn better and remember longer. The responsibility for learning rests with every individual. Teachers and coaches, too, can be more effective right now by helping students understand these principles and by designing them into the learning experience. This is not a book about how education policy or the school system ought to be reformed.

1. Learning Is Misunderstood

Immutable aspects of learning we can probably all agree on:

• To be useful, learning requires memory.
• We need to keep learning and remembering our entire lives, even retirement.
• Learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.

A list of the principal claims in the book:

• Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.
• We are poor judges of when we’re learning well or not.
• Rereading text and massed practice (cramming) are not effective.
• Retrieval practice (recalling from memory, e.g. flashcards) is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. Retrieval strengths memory and interrupts forgetting.
• Spaced, interleaved retrieval is harder and feels less productive but is actually more effective.
• Attempting to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
• Learning styles are not supported by empirical research.
  • People do have multiple intelligences to bring to bear on learning, and you learn better when you draw widely from all your aptitudes.
• Extracting the underlying principles that differentiate different types of problems makes you more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations.
• We’re susceptible to illusions of competency. You build better mastery when testing is used to identify areas of weakness.
• All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
• Practicing elaboration, there’s no known limit to how much you can learn.
• 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 connections you create, the better you will remember it later.
• Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. (Integrating new knowledge into larger schemas helps organize information more efficiently.)
• People who learn to extract key ideas and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery.
• Every time you learn something new, you change the brain.
• We start life with the gift of our genes, but the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your control. Understanding this enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a signal to dig deeper or try a different strategy.

Empirical Evidence versus Theory, Lore, and Intuition

How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. However, over the last 40+ years, cognitive psychologists have been working to clarify what works and discover effective strategies.

• Cognitive psychology: understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think.
• Developmental and educational psychologists: concerned with theories of human development and how they can be used to shape education.
• Neuroscientists: use imaging and other tools to advance our understanding of brain mechanisms that underlie learning, but have a ways to go before improving education.

People Misunderstand Learning

Many teachers incorrectly believe that making learning easier and faster will make learning better. Much research turns this on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

Gains achieved from massed practice (cramming) persist because people see fast gains. However, gains achieved during massed practice melt away quickly.

Rereading textbooks is the number one strategy of most people (80% of college students) and feels effective. However, it’s time consuming, not durable, and gives an illusion of mastery.

Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

Belief in the power of repetition is pervasive but incorrect. It might work for holding a phone number in your head, but it doesn’t work for durable learning.

Early Evidence (Rereading ineffective)

Research was done on the effectiveness of rereading texts and found that re-readings in close succession is time-consuming and yields negligible benefit.

Illusions of Knowing

We ought to be better at building both knowledge and creativity. Without knowledge, you don’t have the foundation for higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving. One cannot apply what they know if one does not know anything to apply.

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.

Testing: Dipstick Versus Learning Tool (Testing as tool)

If we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning, and think of it as retrieval practice, we can use testing as a tool for learning.

The more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit. (Think flight simulator vs lecture or quiz vs rereading.)

Retrieval has to profound benefits:

• It tells you what you know and don’t know and can focus further study.
• Recall causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory.

The Takeaway

• For the most part, we are learning in the wrong ways, based on lore and intuition.
• One of the best habits a learner can instill is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.
• Simple and practical strategies to learn better and remember longer:
  • retrieval practice (low-stakes quizzing, self -testing)
  • spacing out practice
  • interleaving
  • trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution (productive failure)
  • distilling the underlying principles that differentiate problem types

2. To Learn, Retrieve

The Takeaway

• Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention. This is true for anything the brain is asked to remember— facts, complex concepts, motor skills, etc.
• Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention.
  • The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval.
  • Delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent than immediate practice because delayed retrieval requires more effort.
• Repeated retrieval makes memories more durable and produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.
• Cramming can produce better scores on an immediate exam, but the advantage quickly fades relative to retrieval practice.
• Simply including one test in a class yields a large improvement in final exam scores, and gains continue to increase as the frequency of classroom testing increases.
• Testing doesn’t need to be initiated by the instructor. Students can use flashcards or other self-testing. It’s more effortful but the greater effort means more will be retained.
• Testing enables an instructor to spot gaps and misconceptions and adapt instruction.
• Giving students corrective feedback after tests keeps them from incorrectly r ffort required to switch between tasks and recall relevant information strengthens memory.
• Varied practice helpers learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust accordingly.
  • “Blocked practice” is easily mistaken for varied practice. For example, studying flashcards in the same order without ever shuffling them.
• Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization and into higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building deeper and more durable learning.
• Spacing, interleaving, and variability are nature features of life. The common term is “learning from experience.”
  • Some people seem to never learn from experience though. Perhaps they’ve not cultivated the habit of reflection, a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).

4. Embrace Difficulties

The Takeaway

• Learning is at least a three-step process:
  • Initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory.
  • Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory.
  • Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.
• Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know.
• Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge.
• Your facility for recall depends on the repeated use of the information (to keep retrieval routes strong) and on establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories.
• Periodic retrieval of learning helps strengthens connections to the memory and cues for recalling it, while also weakening routes to competing memories.
  • “Retrieval-induced forgetting” occurs when recall of specific information inhibits or suppresses related memories that are not recalled.
• Retrieval difficulty is correlated with greater benefit.
• Recalling from long-term memory, versus short-term memory, is more effortful and both strengthens the memory and makes learning pliable again, leading to its reconsolidation.
  • Reconsolidation helps update your memories with new information and connect them to more recent learning.
• Repeated effortful recall or practice helps integrate learning into mental models, in which a set of interrelated ideas are fused into a meaningful whole that can be adapted and applied in later settings.
  • For example, a student learning economic theories might begin by understanding individual concepts like inflation and market equilibrium. Over time, the student begins to see how these individual concepts interrelate and form a broader understanding of economic systems.
• When practice conditions are varied, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction.
  • Discrimination is the ability to distinguish between similar but distinct ideas or concepts.
  • Induction is making generalization from specific observations or instances. This is critical for developing broader understanding and theories from specific data points.
• Interleaving and variation build new connections, expanding and more firmly entrenching knowledge in memory and increasing the number of cues for retrieval.
• The generation effect and productive failure: Trying to come up with an answer, rather than having it presented to you, leads to better learning and longer retention, even when your attempted response is wrong, as long as corrective feedback is provided.

5. Avoid Illusions of Knowing

• Metacognition is monitoring our own thinking or what we know about what we know. Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us stay focused, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might improve.
  • An important skill of metacognition is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves.
• In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes our two analytics systems:
  • System 1, or the automatic system, is unconscious, intuitive, and immediate. It draws on our senses and memories to size up a situation in the blink of an eye.
  • System 2, the controlled system, is our slower process of conscious analysis and reasoning. It’s the part of thinking that considers choice, makes decisions, and exerts self-control. We also use it to train System 1.
• The curse of knowledge is our tendency to assume that others have information that is available to ourselves, assuming others share a background and understanding.
  • As you get more expert in complex areas, your mental models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory.
• The Dunning-Kruger effect is a bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain tend to overestimate their ability.
• When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgements of what works and what doesn’t, and we are easily misled.
  • This should give pause regarding “student-directed learning,” a theory that holds that students know best what they need to study, how to study, and at what pace.
  • “most students will learn academics better under an instructor who knows where improvement is needed and structures the practice required to achieve it.”
• Illusion of competence: Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not always a reliable indicator of learning.
• How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging your comprehension, because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your own words, and explain why they are significant— how they relate to the larger subject.
• Frequent testing and retrieval practice clarifies what you really know versus what you think you know.
• Self-insight leads through other people:
  • Learners should seek feedback from instructors. The practice of, peer review also serves as an external gauge.
  • The apprenticeship model.
  • Teams of people with complementary expertise are also powerful.
  • Training that simulates real-world demands and dynamic conditions helpers learners assess mastery.

6. Get Beyond Learning Styles

The Takeaway

• Take an active, self-directed approach to learning. Mastery is a quest that requires effort and active engagement.
• The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives. You you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the way you learn and perform.
• While difficulties that require increased cognitive effort can strengthen learning, not all difficulties we face have that effect. For example, dyslexia.
• The idea of “learning styles” has little scientific evidence and rests on dubious theoretical grounds.
  • There’s a variety of learning styles models. The most common is VARK (visual, auditory, reading, and kinesthetic.)
  • Everyone has learning preferences, but the critical claim by learning styles, that we learn better, is incorrect.
  • However, a review of learning styles found that when instructional styles matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their learning preferences. e.g. visual instructional for geometry and geography, verbal instruction for poetry, etc.
• Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence: fluid and crystallized.
  • Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences challenges the notion of intelligence as a single, fixed construct measured by IQ tests.
    • Gardner’s ideas are attractive because they attempt to explain human differences that we can observe but cannot account for with modern, Western definitions of intelligence,
    • Unlike learning styles, which can have the perverse effect of causing individuals to perceive their learning abilities as limited, multiple intelligences theory elevates the variety of tools in our kit.
    • The scientific consensus is that multiple intelligences lacks empirical validation, and is more art than science.
    • Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has proposed a three intelligences model (analytical, creative, and practical) that’s supported by empirical research.
• Go wide: Learners should utilize all their resources and “intelligences” to acquire knowledge and skills. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into preferred learning styles.
• Embrace the notion of “successful intelligence:” actively seek out knowledge and skills, continually improve upon weaknesses, and employ learning strategies.
• Embrace a trial-and-error approach.
• Don’t rely on what feels best: use quizzing, peer review, etc. to make your your self-assessment is accurate.
• Difficulties in learning that can be overcome with greater cognitive effort are beneficial for the depth and durability of learning.
• Learners should focus on distilling the underlying principles and building a structure or framework to organize the central ideas and supporting arguments. By building a mental framework, learners can organize knowledge in a way that facilitates understanding, retention, and application.
  • In other words, understand the core concepts and create a mental model or schema that connects these ideas in a meaningful way.
  • They key is to go beyond simple memorization of facts and instead focus on understanding the underlying principles and how they relate to each other.

7. Increase Your Abilities

8. Make It Stick