Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning — Peter C. Brown

 

Rating: ★★★★½

​Summary: Many of the most effective learning practices are underused in formal education. Common strategies like highlighting texts, re-reading passages and all-night study sessions typically don't work that well. These methods fool you into believing that you know the material far better than you do.

On the other hand, approaches that feel slow and counterintuitive often result in far better retention, understanding, and mastery. 

You can use the handy mnemonic RIVERS to remember some of the main effective practices from the book:

• Retrieval
• Interleaving
• Varied Practice
• Elaboration
• Reflection
• Spaced Repetition

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Far from being a peripheral aspect of education, memory is essential for being able to recall, synthesize and understand complex ideas. In fact, the authors of the book define learning as “acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.”

Unless you can use the skill or knowledge that you are developing, you are not learning optimally. 

​You can find my detailed reading notes below:

“We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.”

#1 — Learning involves memory
#2 — Learning needs to happen throughout life
#3 — Learning is an acquired skill
#4 — Learning is (or should be) effortful

Rereading and massed practice are least effective. Recall, spaced practice, self-testing, trying problems without solutions and interleaving work much better.

Catering to learning styles doesn’t work.

Understanding underlying principles and “rules” helps more when faced with unfamiliar situations.

Elaboration solidifies understanding, because you explain a concept using examples and details that you have observed.

“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.”

We should stop viewing testing as a futile act of memorization and start conceiving of it as an act of retrieval. That way, it becomes a tool for learning.

Reflection is a form of practice, and it involves several cognitive exercises: retrieval of prior learning and experience, mental rehearsal and visualization. 

Remembering what you have learned and creative thinking are not mutually exclusive. Both retrieval and the imagination are necessary.
 
The ultimate guide to recall: first test sooner after (15-20 minutes), second test after 7 days.

“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.”

The generation effect is the phenomenon whereby individuals have better memories when they generate ideas in their own minds instead of reading them.

In a 2007 study, surprise pop quizzes as the main form of assessment in a course made students feel threatened, and diminished attendance. Having fewer tests didn’t help either. However, multiple low stakes quizzes spaced throughout the term led to higher rates of retention and attendance.

The more effort involved in recall, the more knowledge is retained. This is why short answer questions and short essays help students remember more material than multiple choice or true/false questions, which only require recognition.

Delayed feedback contributes to better recall, as opposed to immediate feedback, which can become a kind of crutch. In kinetic learning, like throwing free-throws or swinging a golf club, the delay between action and result may make practice awkward, but it stimulates learning more than if the outcomes were immediate. 

Immediate feedback is like having training wheels on a bike; they end up being the default state, instead of improving performance.

Robert Bjork coined the term desirable difficulty to address the importance of challenge when it comes to certain facets of learning. 

Retrieval is more effective at promoting retention when it is more difficult. Conversely, the easier is it is to retrieve something, the less of an effect it has on improving memory.

Learning involves three basic stages: Encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Encoding is when you process language and the observed movements into signals in your brain that form mental representations or impressions of what is being learned.

Consolidation is when you solidify those representations and encoded patterns through spacing, varied practice, and sleep.

Retrieval is when you pull those patterns back into working memory to perform a task or answer a question. While we have a nearly infinite capacity for consolidated memory, we only have access to a certain amount of them at any given time.

Questions to encourage generation and retreival:

What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? 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?

Memory distortions, perceptual illusions and our hunger for narrative lead us to make faulty decisions or fail to grasp reality as it is. 

Because memory is a reconstruction, we often miss certain details and find ourselves needing to fill the gaps of our knowledge with stories that fit with our identity.

Hindsight bias is when we overestimate our predictive capabilities after an event has occurred, while illusions of fluency arise when we falsely believe we have a firm grasp of information because we have been repeatedly exposed to it.

Experts often fall prey to the curse of knowledge, by underestimating how long it will take for someone new to the field to learn an unfamiliar ability or concept. They simply can’t put themselves into the shoes of a novice, and are disconnected from the struggle and effort required to learn the basics. 

From the perspective of learning, Kahneman’s system 2—the slower, methodical mode of thinking—can train and program the intuitive and rapid system 1 to perform difficult tasks well.

Student-centred learning is laudable but lacks efficacy, because students aren’t capable of implementing the best learning methods without guidance and structure.

Mental models are like smartphone apps for your brain.

The false consensus effect: believing that everyone around you agrees with your positions, and sees things the way you do. When in fact, your perspective is idiosyncratic and differs from other people’s. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect can be countered with judgment training and metacognition.

“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.”

A significant part of one’s abilities comes from how they perceive themselves and their sense of self-efficacy.

Recognizing underlying patterns and rules when encountering feedback is the hallmark of a successful learner. Bruce Hendry had ‘street smarts”, which amounts to the formation of accurate mental models based on experiences. 

Risk, coupled with the right kind of knowledge, can lead to outsized successes.

Peer instruction by Mazur has students do the reading at home. They come to class, think through a relevant example on their own, and then form groups to try to reach an agreement. Mazur revisits the material as a class, before polling students to see if their thinking has changed.

The four learning styles, as well as Gardner’s 8 intelligences, lack scientific backing. However, there is a theory of multiple intelligences that has some weight of evidence behind it— it includes practical, analytical, and creative intelligence.

Just because a student is lagging in a particular area (like analytical intelligence) doesn’t mean that he or she can’t develop mastery in it at his/her own rate.

Dynamic testing aims at revealing weaknesses and fostering growth in those areas. It involves three steps:

1. a test of comprehension or ability that demonstrates errors,
   
2. practice, retrieval and other effective learning techniques
   
3. further testing, focused on what has been learned, but also on where more growth is necessary.

“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.”

“Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test, something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps into your being with old age and grey hair.”

Some people are rule based learners and others are example based learners. Rule based learners tend to be high structure based learners as well. they infer rules from examples and deftly construct mental models of learned material. Example based learners are lower on the structure building scale, and benefit from looking at more than one example at a time, and continuously referring to main ideas and principles: asking: “what are the rules at play here? What are the driving forces?”

Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test is an accurate metaphor for our capacities to learn. We are endowed with a certain measure of DNA that influences our aptitude and our biology, but focus and self-discipline also play an important role in determining how well we learn. 

All knowledge and mental representations are stored physically; as the brain changes, knowledge and skill sets can change as well.

Grey matter is mostly neurons, while white matter is comprised of axons, dendrites, and myelin sheaths. Musicians and other performers have more myelin coating their neural connections—which leads to stronger and more rapid firing between neurons—and hence more white matter.  

We don’t see with our eyes. We see with our brains. Researchers have been able to restore people’s sight and vestibular system function by linking a video camera (and a carpenter’s level) to their tongues. The brain rewires itself, allocating the visual or proprioceptive parts of the brain toward the tongue. 

Children have 100 billion neurons at the age of 2, and then lose 50% of them during synaptic pruning. 

Most skill development and knowledge acquisition occurs after peak neuron count. 

IQ is not fixed, but can be influenced by factors such as nutrition (fatty acids), reading with a parent (especially when they elaborate), and early childhood education. 

While we know that crystallized intelligence is malleable, the only study that showed changes in fluid intelligence was small and can’t be replicated.

IQ doesn’t matter as much as grit, curiosity, persistence, and growth mindset.

Praising intelligence leads to an overemphasis on how one looks, while praising effort provides a metric that a student can control.

Performance goals are separate from learning goals. Performance goals are related to outcomes and looking good—failure is to be avoided at all costs. Learning goals prioritize new knowledge and skill development—failure is feedback that allows students to redouble their efforts or try a different strategy.

Students that are praised for intelligence give up on puzzles quickly, while those who are taught that intelligence is largely within their control and is based on effort spent more time working on puzzles, and completed them more often.

Retrieval is an effective study strategy. The longer you wait to recall information or concepts, the more challenging it becomes, but the more you will be able to consolidate.

Elaboration involving metaphors, analogies, and multiple examples primes learning, especially when it’s active.

Learning by doing is a type of generation: you attempt to solve the problem or complete the task while drawing on your repertoire of skills. When you come up against the limits of your abilities, you know you are gaining new ground.