Index
Make It Stick
While the brain is not a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger, when the memory is retrieved and the learning is practiced. 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.
underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations.
Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned.
limit of what you can keep in mind. However, if you practice 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 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.
every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the
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.
Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.
Learning is stronger when it matters,
rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.
Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them.
But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning—if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than “testing,” we open ourselves to another possibility: the use of testing as a tool for learning.
Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem.
There was concern that if students tested better in the final exam on material that had been quizzed than on material not quizzed, it could be argued that the simple act of reexposing them to the material in the quizzes was responsible for the superior learning, not the retrieval practice.
the act of retrieving a memory changes the memory, making it easier to retrieve again later.
Students who have been quizzed have a double advantage over those who have not: a more accurate sense of what they know and don’t know, and the strengthening of learning that accrues from retrieval practice.16
when the mind has to work, learning sticks better. The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval.
Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility.
Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn’t feel like you’re on top of it. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.
The mixing of problem types, which boosted final test performance by a remarkable 215 percent, actually impeded performance during initial learning.
But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it.
When you have learned under conditions of massed or blocked repetition, you have had no practice on that critical sorting process. But this is the way life usually unfolds: problems and opportunities come at us unpredictably, out of sequence. For our learning to have practical value, we must be adept at discerning “What kind of problem is this?” so we can select and apply an appropriate solution. Several studies have demonstrated the improved powers of discrimination to be gained through interleaved and varied practice.
It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.
go to these conferences and they have no repeated exposure whatsoever to it. It’s just a matter of happenstance whether they end up finally seeing a patient in the future whose problem relates back to the conference topic. Otherwise, they don’t study the material, they are certainly not tested on the material, they just listen then they walk out.”
Larsen would like to see something done to interrupt the forgetting: give a quiz at the end of a conference and follow it with spaced retrieval practice. “Make quizzing a standard part of the culture and the curriculum. You just know every week you’re going to get in your email your ten questions that you need to work through.”
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.
Sleep seems to play a large role in memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.
Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing. 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.
Beware of the familiarity trap: the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it.
Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit.
You need to shuffle your flashcards. If you always practice the same skill in the same way, from the same place on the ice or field, in the same set of math problems, or during the same sequence in a flight simulator, you’re starving your learning on short rations of variety. Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives.
Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).
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. Facing the jump door may always reawaken feelings of terror, but the moment she’s out, Mia says, the fear evaporates.
the process of learning something often starts out feeling disorganized and unwieldy; the most important aspects are not always salient. Consolidation helps organize and solidify learning, and, notably, so does retrieval after a lapse of some time, because the act of retrieving a memory from long-term storage can both strengthen the memory traces and at the same time make them modifiable again, enabling them, for example, to connect to more recent learning. This process is called reconsolidation.
when you let the memory recede a little, for example 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.4
Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with us.
The mental rehearsal you conduct while lying in your bunk too tired to sleep and wishing the next day was already over and well-jumped is a form of spaced practice, and that helps you, too.
There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn,
the more possible connections we create for further learning.
This limitation on retrieval is helpful to us: if every memory were always readily to hand, you would have a hard time sorting through the sheer volume of material to put your finger on the knowledge you need at the moment: where did I put my hat, how do I sync my electronic devices, what goes into a perfect brandy Manhattan?
when a sight or sound or smell brings back a memory in full force, even some episode you have not thought about in years.8
Context can unleash memories, as when the right key works to open an old lock. In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,
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.
It’s the effortful process of reconstructing the knowledge that triggers reconsolidation and deeper learning.
It turns out that when the outline of a lecture proceeds in a different order from the textbook passage, the effort to discern the main ideas and reconcile the discrepancy produces better recall of the content. In another surprise, when letters are omitted from words in a text, requiring the reader to supply them, reading is slowed, and retention improves.
Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still. Overcoming these mild difficulties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher-order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge
It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.
(retrieval, elaboration, generation)
students who have a high fear of making errors when taking tests may actually do worse on the test because of their anxiety.
of their working memory capacity is expended to monitor their performance
leaving less working memory capacity available to solve the problems posed by the test.
thousands of hours of dedicated practice in which one strives to surpass one’s current level of ability, a process in which failure becomes an essential experience on the path to mastery.
It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon-fed the solution, even if we fall short in our first attempts at an answer.
“Look, blundering’s really not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that you get stuff done. A lot of people, when they contemplate the enormity of the task and they see all that’s entailed, they’re stopped in their tracks.”
Of course, in some settings—like learning to jump out of airplanes
is not the optimal learning strategy.
To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.
definition of desiderable difficulties
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.
Good judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance.
One is that when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change.
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.
Memory has some similarities to a Google search algorithm, in the sense that the more you connect what you learn to what you already know, and the more associations you make to a memory (for example, linking it with a visual image, a place, or a larger story), then the more mental cues you have through which to find and retrieve the memory again later.
Memory is a reconstruction. We cannot remember every aspect of an event, so we remember those elements that have greatest emotional significance for us, and we fill in the gaps with details of our own that are consistent with our narrative but may be wrong.
“the big lie” technique—even a big lie told repeatedly can come to be accepted as truth.
the feeling of knowing and be mistaken for true.
social influence and tend to align with the memories of the people around us.
Their research showed that incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve. (The title of their initial paper on the topic was “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”)
it’s easy to blame the tool for what the hand cannot do.
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.
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.
How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging 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.
Action beats reaction every time. That’s one mantra that’s drilled into our minds.
because you will play like you practice. Sometimes the most powerful feedback for calibrating your sense of what you do and don’t know are the mistakes you make in the field, assuming you survive them and are receptive to the lesson.
go where the competition isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take risks, be honest.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I’m good at, what I care about most, and where I’m headed. If you’re among the last kids standing on the sidelines as the softball teams are chosen up, the way you understand your place in the world likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the subsequent paths you take.
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.
Analytical intelligence is our ability to complete problem-solving tasks such as those typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to synthesize and apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability to adapt to everyday life—to understand what needs to be done in a specific setting and then do it; what we call street smarts. Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in a particular situation is not measured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies.
Dynamic testing has three steps. Step 1: a test of some 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.
cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a story, strengthens learning.
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.
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.
you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.
The marshmallow study is sublime in its simplicity and as a metaphor for life. We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self-discipline, which are the offspring of motivation and one’s sense of personal empowerment.
world endowed with the raw material of our genes, but we become capable through the learning and development of mental models and neural pathways that enable us to reason, solve, and create.
We’re born with about 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons. A synapse is a connection between neurons, enabling them to pass signals. For a period shortly before and after birth, we undergo “an exuberant burst of synapse formation,” in which the brain wires itself: the neurons sprout microscopic branches, called axons, that reach out in search of tiny nubs on other neurons, called dendrites. When axon meets dendrite, a synapse is formed. In order for some axons to find their target dendrites they must travel vast distances to complete the connections that make up our neural circuitry (a journey of such daunting scale and precision that Bruer likens it to finding one’s way clear across the United States to a waiting partner on the opposite coast, not unlike Kit Carson’s mission to President Polk for General Fremont). It’s this circuitry that enables our senses, cognition, and motor skills, including learning and memory, and it is this circuitry that forms the possibilities and the limits of one’s intellectual capacity.
the eyes are not what sees, the brain is. The eyes sense, and the brain interprets. The success of this device relies on the brain learning to interpret signals from the tongue as sight.
hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life.
The fact that retrieval practice, spacing, rehearsal, rule learning, and the construction of mental models improve learning and memory is evidence of neuroplasticity and is consistent with scientists’ understanding of memory consolidation as an agent for increasing and strengthening the neural pathways by which one is later able to retrieve and apply learning.
Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breast-feeding women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by anywhere from 3.5 to 6.5 points.
educational tools, books, and puzzles and trained how to help their children learn to speak and identify objects in the home, the children showed IQ gains.
When mothers of three-year-olds in low-income families were trained to talk to their children frequently and at length and to draw out the children with many open-ended questions, the children’s IQs rose.
The brain is not a muscle, so strengthening one skill does not automatically strengthen others.
“Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.
success. “Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”
Humans remember pictures more easily than words.
Despite being well grounded in their material, the stakes at play can make their minds go blank the moment they confront the empty exam booklet and the proctor’s ticking clock. That’s where having taken the time to construct a memory palace proves as good as gold. It’s not important that you understand the intricacies of British A-levels, just that they are difficult and highly consequential, which is why mnemonic devices are such a welcome tool at exam time.
Mnemonic devices are sometimes discounted as tricks of memory, not tools that fundamentally add to learning, and in a sense this is correct. The value of mnemonics to raise intellectual abilities comes after mastery of new material, as the students at Bellerbys are using them: as handy mental pockets for filing what they’ve learned, and linking the main ideas in each pocket to vivid memory cues so that they can readily bring them to mind and retrieve the associated concepts and details, in depth, at the unexpected moments that the need arises.
The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefits is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.
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?
Periodically practicing new knowledge and skills through self-quizzing strengthens your learning of it and your ability to connect it to prior knowledge.
when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it. If you restudy something after failing to recall it, you actually learn it better than if you had not tried to recall it. The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future.
as you quiz yourself on new material, also reach back to retrieve prior material and ask yourself how that knowledge relates to what you have subsequently learned.
Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions. How much time? It depends on the material.
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.
As you reconstruct learning from long-term memory, as awkward as it feels, you are strengthening your mastery as well as the memory.
alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each.
Even when learners achieve superior mastery from interleaved practice, they persist in feeling that blocked practice serves them better. You may also experience this feeling, but you now have the advantage of knowing that studies show that this feeling is illusory.
ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application of it
is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.
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.
The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later.
GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning.
Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution.
You can practice generation when reading new class material by trying to explain beforehand the key ideas you expect to find in the material and how you expect they will relate to your prior knowledge. Then read the material to see if you were correct. As a result of having made the initial effort, you will be more astute at gleaning the substance and relevance of the reading material, even if it differs from your expectation.
REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.
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.
CALIBRATION is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time.
MNEMONIC DEVICES help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory
They give you handy ways to store information and find it again when you need it.
Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned.
He says there’s not enough time to learn everything about everything, but pausing to make it meaningful helps it stick.
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.
your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists.
You engage it by making the effort to explain the material yourself, in your own words—connecting the facts, making it vivid, relating it to what you already know. Learning, like writing, is an act of engagement. Struggling with the puzzle stirs your creative juices, sets the mind to looking for parallels and metaphors from elsewhere in your experience, knowledge that can be transferred and applied here. It makes you hungry for the solution. And the solution, when you arrive at it, becomes more deeply embedded with your prior knowledge and abilities than anything pasted onto the surface of your brain by PowerPoint. So take a page from McPhee: when you want to master something new, delete the whimpering and go wrestle the bear.
In particular, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these:
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.
“If you’ve read every word of this chapter, you’re not being very efficient.” The point is not to “slide your eyes over the words.” You start with questions, and you read for answers.8
how to shoot an azimuth. It’s a skill used for keeping your bearings in unfamiliar territory.
high-structure classes help students who lack a history of using effective learning techniques and habits to develop them and succeed in rigorous settings.
few things you might consider doing. One, get a copy of the presentation materials and use them to quiz yourself on the key ideas, much as Nathaniel Fuller quizzes himself
commercial training platform called Qstream that helps trainers send learners periodic quizzes via their mobile devices to strengthen learning through spaced retrieval practice. Similarly, an emerging platform called Osmosis uses mobile and Web based software to provide learners access to thousands of crowdsourced practice questions and explanations. Osmosis combines the testing effect, spacing, and social networking to facilitate what its developers call “student-driven social learning.” Qstream (qstream.com) and Osmosis (osmose-it.com) suggest interesting possibilities for redesigning in-service training for professionals. Many other companies are developing similar programs.
Kaizen is a Japanese term for improvement.
The idea is not to let words just “slide through your brain.”