Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - by Peter C. Brown
Date read: 2020-10-02How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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How we think we should learn is often very different than how we should learn and to truly remember things. Great book that walks through the few studies that have been conducted on how to learn better by debunking common techniques that gives us the illusion that we're learning, when in actuality, we are only learning something in the short-term. Recommended for anyone trying to get more out of what they read or study, both as a student and for training your teams.
Contents:
- HOW TO LEARN - RETRIEVE
- MIX UP YOUR PRACTICE
- EMBRACE DIFFICULTIES
- PRACTICE TECHNIQUES
- DYNAMIC TESTING
- STRUCTURE BUILDING
- RULE VS. EXAMPLE LEARNING
- TIPS FOR ACADEMIC LEARNING
- TIPS FOR CONTINUOUS LEARNING
My Notes
Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.
Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.
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.
Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
Belief in the power of rereading, intentionality, and repetition is pervasive, but the truth is you usually can’t embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over. This tactic might work when looking up a phone number and holding it in your mind while punching it into your phone, but it doesn’t work for durable learning. A simple example, reproduced on the Internet (search “penny memory test”), presents a dozen different images of a common penny, only one of which is correct.
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.
Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.
Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.
In very short order we lose something like 70 percent of what we’ve just heard or read.
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.
When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.
Studies show that giving feedback strengthens retention more than testing alone does, and, interestingly, some evidence shows that delaying the feedback briefly produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback.
While practicing is vital to learning and memory, studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it’s broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out.
How big an interval, you ask? The simple answer: enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition. At a minimum, enough time so that a little forgetting has set in. A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in practice, but you do not want so much forgetting that retrieval essentially involves relearning the material.
Interleaving the practice of two or more subjects or skills is also a more potent alternative to massed practice.
Varied practice—like tossing your beanbags into baskets at mixed distances—improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another.
The German scientist Sebastian Leitner developed his own system for spaced practice of flashcards, known as the Leitner box. Think of it as a series of four file-card boxes. In the first are the study materials (be they musical scores, hockey moves, or Spanish vocabulary flashcards) that must be practiced frequently because you often make mistakes in them. In the second box are the cards you’re pretty good at, and that box gets practiced less often than the first, perhaps by a half. The cards in the third box are practiced less often than those in the second, and so on. If you miss a question, make mistakes in the music, flub the one-touch pass, you move it up a box so you will practice it more often.
The underlying idea is simply that the 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.
Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties.
The more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it. In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.
The more effort that is required to recall a memory or to execute a skill, provided that the effort succeeds, the more the act of recalling or executing benefits the learning.
When text on a page is slightly out of focus or presented in a font that is a little difficult to decipher, people recall the content better.
The change from normal presentation introduces a difficulty—disruption of fluency—that makes the learner work harder to construct an interpretation that makes sense. The added effort increases comprehension and learning.
The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation. Even if you’re being quizzed on material you’re familiar with, the simple act of filling in a blank has the effect of strengthening your memory of the material and your ability to recall it later.
Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot.
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.
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?
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.
What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered. Teachers often suffer this illusion—the calculus instructor who finds calculus so easy that she can no longer place herself in the shoes of the student who is just starting out and struggling with the subject.
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.
As a learner, you can use any number of practice techniques to self-test your mastery, from answering flashcards to explaining key concepts in your own words, and to peer instruction.
Don’t make the mistake of dropping material from your testing regime once you’ve gotten it correct a couple of times. If it’s important, it needs to be practiced, and practiced again. And don’t put stock in momentary gains that result from massed practice. Space your testing, vary your practice, keep the long view.
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.
People who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.
With continued experience in a field we are always moving from a lower state of competence to a higher one.
A test may assess a weakness, but rather than assuming that the weakness indicates a fixed inability, you interpret it as a lack of skill or knowledge that can be remedied.
The act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them. These frameworks are sometimes called mental models or mental maps.
High structure-builders develop the skill to identify foundational concepts and their key building blocks and to sort new information based on whether it adds to the larger structure and one’s knowledge or is extraneous and can be put aside.
Cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a story, strengthens learning.
Reflecting 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.
High structure-builders and rule learners are more successful in transferring their learning to unfamiliar situations than are low structure-builders and example learners.
Go wide: don’t roost in a pigeonhole of your preferred learning style but take command of your resources and tap all of your “intelligences” to master the knowledge or skill you want to possess. Describe what you want to know, do, or accomplish. Then list the competencies required, what you need to learn, and where you can find the knowledge or skill. Then go get it.
How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know? Many textbooks have study questions at the ends of the chapters, and these are good fodder for self-quizzing. Generating questions for yourself and writing down the answers is also a good way to study.
If you use flashcards, don’t stop quizzing yourself on the cards that you answer correctly a couple of times. Continue to shuffle them into the deck until they’re well mastered. Only then set them aside—but in a pile that you revisit periodically, perhaps monthly. Anything you want to remember must be periodically recalled from memory.
Another way of spacing retrieval practice is to interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it.
If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions.
Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material. Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class.
Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution. For instance: On a small level, the act of filling in a missing word in a text (that is, generating the word yourself rather than having it supplied by the writer) results in better learning and memory of the text than simply reading a complete text.
By wading into the unknown first and puzzling through it, you are far more likely to learn and remember the solution than if somebody first sat you down to teach it to you.
Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?
Your grasp of unfamiliar material often starts out feeling clumsy and approximate. But once you engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, the mind begins to “knit” at the problem on its own.
Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the process of forgetting. Make the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself. Students find quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers find quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes.
Every five minutes or so I throw out a question on the material we just talked about, and I can see them start to look through their notes. I say, “Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it’s going to be easier to find it. But as soon as you get your notes out, you have short-circuited the path. You are not exploring for the path anymore, someone has told you the way.
One of the most important skills taught at West Point is something learned outside the classroom: how to shoot an azimuth. It’s a skill used for keeping your bearings in unfamiliar territory. You climb a tree or a height of land and sight a distant landmark in the direction you’re headed. Compass in hand, you note how many degrees your landmark lies off of due north. Then you descend into the bush and keep working your way in that direction. Periodically, you pause to shoot an azimuth and make sure you’re on course. Quizzing is a way of shooting an azimuth in the classroom: are you gaining the mastery you need to get where you’re trying to go?
Get a copy of the presentation materials and use them to quiz yourself on the key ideas.
Schedule follow-up emails to appear in your inbox every month or so with questions that require you to retrieve the critical learning you gained from the seminar.
Qstream (qstream.com) and Osmosis (osmose-it.com) suggest interesting possibilities for redesigning in-service training for professionals.