Make It Stick:
The Science of Successful Learning
Peter C. Brown
Book Summary, Notes & Highlights
I found it such an interesting read. I never really had many study methods growing up and in my uni days. My method was cram, cram, all-nighter. Most definitely an eye-opening read.
Table of Contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- If you want proven methods of studying and retaining information, you can’t go wrong with these scientifically proven methods.
- Science-backed reasons for doing everything we do and why we do it.
- Just enough theory to validate my understanding.
🧠 My Thoughts
I wish I had read this book back in university. I consider myself to be a lifelong learner so I’m going to be applying these methods going forward.
🥷 Who Should Read It?
Anyone who has who wants to get the most out of their studying efforts.
💡 How the Book Changed Me
I have structure and can learn topics and retain a lot more information than I previously could.
🪶 My Top 3 Quotes
- Avoid illusions of knowing.
- Rereading notes is a waste of time.
- Highlighting you notes is an illusion.
🔥Top Actionable Take-Aways
When learning something feels difficult, that’s when you’re actually learning. If something feels too easy, it means we are fooling ourselves into thinking we are learning.
📒 Summary and Notes
Embrace Difficulties
How Learning Occurs
Learning is at least a three-step process:
Encoding
The brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns you’ve observed.
This process converts sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain.
We call the new representations within the brain memory traces. Think of notes jotted or sketched on a scratchpad, our short-term memory.
Consolidation
The process of strengthening these mental representations for long-term memory is called consolidation.
In consolidation, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces.
The brain replays or rehearses the learning, giving it meaning, filling in blank spots, and making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory.
Sleep seems to help memory consolidation, but in any case, consolidation and transition of learning to long-term storage occur over a period of time.
An analogy of how this works is to think of writing an essay, the first draft is dodgy, but the more times you go back to it in intervals the better and new perspectives you get on it and are able to reiterate.
Retrieval
We recode and consolidate new material from short-term memory into long-term memory.
We must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. This is done by practising it even in different circumstances.
Extending Learning: Updating Retrieval Cues
How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth.
Easier Isn’t Better
This paradox is at the heart of the concept of desirable difficulties in learning: 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.
Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties, a term coined by the psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork.
How Effort Helps
Reconsolidating Memory
Effortful recall of learning, as happens in spaced practice, requires that you “reload” or reconstruct the components of the skill or material anew from long-term memory rather than mindlessly repeating them from short-term memory.
Massed (ie. Cramming) 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.
Creating Mental Models
With enough effortful practice, a complex set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills fuse into a meaningful whole, forming a mental model somewhat akin to a “brain app”.
Mental models are forms of deeply entrenched and highly efficient skills (taking a free kick) or knowledge structures (memorized chess moves) that, like habits, can be adapted and applied in varied circumstances.
Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.
Broadening Mastery
Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material.
This process builds interconnected networks of knowledge that bolster and support mastery of your field. Like a chef knowing how to cook from pan selection to ingredients to textures.
Interleaving and variation mix up the contexts of practice and the other skills and knowledge with which the new material is associated. This makes our mental models more versatile, enabling us to apply our learning to a broader range of situations.
Priming the Mind for Learning
When you’re asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered.
Other Learning Strategies That Incorporate Desirable Difficulties
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 (Trial and Error).
The idea that as you cast about for a solution, retrieving related knowledge from memory, you strengthen the route to a gap in your learning even before the answer is provided to fill it and, when you do fill it, connections are made to the related material that is fresh in your mind from the effort.
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. 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.
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.
After a lecture or reading assignment, for example, you might ask yourself: What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? Following an experience where you are practising 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?
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).
Failure and the Myth of Errorless Learning
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.
Undesirable Difficulties
Desirable difficulties trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering.
Undesirable difficulties are if the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully.
To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.
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 enable 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. Because of the vast capacity of long-term memory, having the ability to locate and recall what you know when you need it is key; your facility for calling up what you know depends on the repeated use of the information (to keep retrieval routes strong) and on your establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories.
Periodic retrieval of learning helps strengthen connections to the memory and the cues for recalling it while also weakening routes to competing memories.
Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit. When you recall learning from short-term memory, as in rapid-fire practice, little mental effort is required, and little long-term benefit accrues. But when you recall it after some time has elapsed, and your grasp of it has become a little rusty, you have to make an effort to reconstruct it. This effortful retrieval both strengthens the memory but also makes the 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 or a sequence of motor skills are fused into a meaningful whole that can be adapted and applied in later settings. Examples are the perceptions and manipulations involved in driving a car or in knocking a curveball out of the ballpark.
When practice conditions are varied, or retrieval is interleaved with the practice of other material, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction and the versatility with which we can apply the learning in new settings at a later date.
Interleaving and variation build new connections, expanding and more firmly entrenching knowledge in memory and increasing the number of cues for retrieval. 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.
Avoid Illusions of Knowing
We’re constantly making judgments about what we know and don’t know and whether we’re capable of handling a task or solving a problem.
We discuss perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, and distortions of memory that commonly mislead people.
Two Systems of Knowing
Daniel Kahneman describes our two analytic systems in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
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 choices, makes decisions and exerts self-control. We also use it to train System 1 to recognize and respond to particular situations that demand reflexive action.
System 1 is automatic and deeply influential, but it is susceptible to illusion, and you depend on System 2 to help you manage yourself: by checking your impulses, planning ahead, identifying choices, thinking through their implications, and staying in charge of your actions.
Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence in the world at large and in any field where you want to be an expert. Think of a pilot in an emergency situation not trusting his instruments and letting system 1 take over because he thinks he knows better.
Illusions and Memory Distortions
Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred.
Another type of memory illusion is one caused by suggestion, which may arise simply in the way a question is asked.
Interference from other events can distort memory. Seeing a picture of a criminal before and then being asked to identify someone for a specific crime they were a victim of, they will choose the person they saw in the image.
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.
Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content.
Just because we remember seeing it doesn’t mean we know it necessarily.
Our memories are also subject to social influence and tend to align with the memories of the people around us.
In the obverse of the social influence effect, humans are predisposed to assume that others share their beliefs, a process called the false consensus effect.
Mental Models
As we develop mastery in the various areas of our lives, we tend to bundle together the incremental steps that are required to solve different kinds of problems, think of them as smartphone apps in the brain.
The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it. Why? As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory (the curse of knowledge).
We need to have the ability to know when our mental models aren’t working: when a situation that seems familiar is actually different and requires that we reach for a different solution and do something new.
Unskilled and Unaware of It
Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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.
Tools and Habits for Calibrating Your Judgment
The most important tool is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know.
Pay attention to the cues you’re using to judge what you have learned. Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not always a reliable indicator of learning. Ease of retrieval after a delay, however, is a good indicator of learning.
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.
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. This plays on the concept of learning from your mistakes and failures.
Get Beyond Learning Styles
We acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fits those preferences. For example, if you consider yourself a visual learner, that won’t make you learn visual material better.
Active Learning from the Get-Go
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.
Likewise, 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 the wheat from the chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.
Our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures count for a lot more than learning visually as a visual learner.
Studies show that more important is that the mode of instruction taught matches the subject being taught. Ie geometry and geography for visual learners, and verbal for poetry.
Successful Intelligence
Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence.
- 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.
Dynamic Testing
Dynamic testing is determining the state of one’s expertise, refocusing learning on areas of low performance; follow-up testing to measure the improvement and to refocus learning so as to keep raising expertise.
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 skill.
Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and 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.
Structure Building (Mental Models or Mental Maps)
Structure building is the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them.
High structure-builders learn new material better than low structure-builders. The latter have difficulty setting aside irrelevant or competing information, and as a result, they tend to hang on to too many concepts to be condensed into a workable model (or overall structure) that can serve as a foundation for further learning.
An analogy that can be used is one of a village lego set. You first separate all the pieces into streets, and building pieces and these can then be looked at like the main ideas in a textbook. The more pieces placed into the groups, the more each take shape. Together then the groups form the larger structure of the village.
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.
By contrast, low structure-builders struggle in figuring out and sticking with an overarching structure and knowing what information needs to fit into it and what ought to be discarded. Structure building is a form of conscious and subconscious discipline: stuff fits, or it doesn’t; it adds nuance, capacity and meaning, or it obscures and overfreights.
We know that when questions are embedded in texts to help focus readers on the main ideas, the learning performance of low-structure builders improves to a level commensurate with high-structure-builders.
Rule versus Example Learning
Rule learners tend to abstract the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate the examples being studied.
Example learners tend to memorize the examples rather than the underlying principles. When they encounter an unfamiliar case, they lack a grasp of the rules needed to classify or solve it, so they generalize from the nearest example they can remember, even if it is not particularly relevant to the new case.
We know that high structure builders and rule learners are more successful in transferring their learning to unfamiliar situations than are low structure-builders and example learners.
Be the one in charge. Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test.
Embrace the notion of successful intelligence. 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.
Consider your expertise to be in a state of continuing development, practice dynamic testing as a learning strategy to discover your weaknesses, and focus on improving yourself in those areas. It’s smart to build on your strengths, but you will become ever more competent and versatile if you also use testing and trial and error to continue to improve in the areas where your knowledge or performance are not pulling their weight.
Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia who have become high achievers, develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.
Don’t rely on what feels best: like a good pilot checking his instruments, use quizzing, peer review, and the other tools described in Chapter 5 to make sure your judgment of what you know and can do is accurate, and that your strategies are moving you toward your goals.
Don’t assume that you’re doing something wrong if the learning feels hard. Remember that difficulties you can overcome with greater cognitive effort will more than repay you in the depth and durability of your learning.
Distill the underlying principles; build the structure.
If you’re an example learner, study examples two at a time or more, rather than one by one, asking yourself in what ways they are alike and different.
Are the differences such that they require different solutions, or are the similarities such that they respond to a common solution?
Break your idea or desired competency down into its component parts. If you think you are a low structure-builder or an example learner trying to learn new material, pause periodically and ask what the central ideas are, and what the rules are.
Describe each idea and recall the related points. Which are the big ideas, and which are supporting concepts or nuances? If you were to test yourself on the main ideas, how would you describe them?
What kind of scaffold or framework can you imagine that holds these central ideas together?
Structure is all around us and available to us through the poet’s medium of metaphor. A tree, with its roots, trunk, and branches. A river. A village, encompassing streets and blocks, houses and stores and offices. The structure of the village explains how these elements are interconnected so that the village has a life and a significance that would not exist if these elements were scattered randomly across an empty landscape.
By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.
Increase Your Abilities
Neuroplasticity
We’re born with about 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. A synapse is a connection between neurons, enabling them to pass signals.
Neurons sprout microscopic branches, called axons, that reach out in search of tiny nubs on other neurons, called dendrites. When an axon meets a dendrite, a synapse is formed.
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 thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, performance.
Ie. Increases in piano practice, for example, have shown correlated increases in the myelination of nerve fibres associated with finger movements and the cognitive processes that are involved in making music, changes that do not appear in nonmusicians.
Another fundamental sign of the brain’s enduring mutability is the discovery that the hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life. This phenomenon is called neurogenesis.
Is IQ Mutable?
IQ is a product of genes and environment.
Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by anywhere from 3.5 to 6.5 points.
Certain fatty acids provide building blocks for nerve cell development that the body cannot produce by itself, and the theory behind the results is that these supplements support the creation of new synapses.
Brain Training?
While you cannot increase your IQ through brain training per, see there are strategies or behaviours that can serve as cognitive “multipliers” to amp up the performance of the intelligence we already have.
These are:
- Embracing a growth mindset
- Practising like an expert
- Constructing memory cues
1. Growth Mindset
The belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fixed but rests to a large degree in your own hands.
It was found that the two fundamental differences are how a person attributes failure: those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”—become helpless. Those who interpret failure as the result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.
More than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success. The power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.
2. Deliberate Practice
If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal-directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance. Be uncomfortable with your practice.
The central idea here is that expert performance is a product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of genetic predisposition, and that becoming an expert is not beyond the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation, time, and discipline to pursue it.
If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal-directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance. Be uncomfortable with your practice.
Mnemonic devices, as we mentioned, are mental tools to help hold material in memory, cued for ready recall. For example when we assign something to visual places in our memory.
What they hold in common is a structure of some kind—number scheme, travel route, floor plan, song, poem, aphorism, acronym—that is deeply familiar and whose elements can be easily linked to the target information to be remembered.
The memory palace serves not as a learning tool but as a method to organize what’s already been learned so as to be readily retrievable at essay time. Mnemonics can help organize large bodies of knowledge to permit their ready retrieval.
A handy way students use them is as 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.
Effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capabilities. Our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape.
The path to complex mastery or expert performance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self-discipline, grit, and persistence.
Conscious mnemonic devices can help to organize and cue the learning for ready retrieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that characterize expert performance.
Make It Stick
Learning Tips for Students
Study Strategies:
1. Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory
What does this mean?
“Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing. Use this instead of just rereading notes.
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 at 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?
- Use textbook questions at the end as a self-quizzing guide.
- Generating questions for yourself and writing down the answers is also a good way to study.
- Set aside a little time every week to quiz yourself on current and previous weeks’ work.
- Check your answers so you can judge your knowledge of it. Use quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your studying to make them strong.
- The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefit of doing so.
What your intuition tells you to do:
Most students spend their time underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides. This is an illusion though to make you think you learning because it feels like you are.
Why retrieval practice is better:
Familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing.
Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.
Quizzing simply arrests forgetting.
How it feels:
Compared to rereading, self-quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels.
2. Space Out Your Retrieval Practice
What does this mean?
Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.
How to use spaced practice as a study strategy:
Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions.
When you are feeling more sure of your mastery of certain material, quiz yourself on it once a month. Anything you want to remember must be periodically recalled from memory.
<aside> 🔥 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.
</aside>
What your intuition tells you to do:
Intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to single-minded, repetitive practice of something we want to master, the massed “practice-practice-practice” regime we have been led to believe is essential for building mastery of a skill or learning new knowledge.
Why spaced practice is better:
It’s a common but mistaken belief that you can burn something into memory through sheer repetition.
If you use self-quizzing as your primary study strategy and space out your study sessions so that a little forgetting has happened since your last practice, you will have to work harder to reconstruct what you already studied. This essential is better than for learning; you can think of it as “reloading” material from your long-term memory.
How it feels:
Massed practice feels more productive than spaced practice, but it is not. Spaced practice feels more difficult, because you have gotten a little rusty and the material is harder to recall.
3. Interleave the Study of Different Problem Types
What does this mean?
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.
How to use interleaved practice as a study strategy:
When you structure your study regimen, once you reach the point where you understand a new problem type and its solution but your grasp of it is still rudimentary, scatter this problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you are alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each.
If you find yourself falling into single-minded, repetitive practice of a particular topic or skill, change it up: mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution.
What your intuition tells you to do:
Most learners focus on many examples of one problem or specimen type at a time, wanting to master the type and “get it down cold” before moving on to study another type.
Why interleaved practice is better:
Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real-world settings where you must discern the kind of problem you’re trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution.
How it feels:
Blocked practice—that is, mastering all of one type of problem before progressing to practice another type—feels (and looks) like you’re getting better mastery as you go, whereas interrupting the study of one type to practice a different type feels disruptive and counterproductive. 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.
Other Effective Study Strategies
4. Elaboration
ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application of it.
What is it?
Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.
For Instance:
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.
A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a metaphor or visual image for the new material. For example, to better grasp the principles of angular momentum in physics, visualize how a figure skater’s rotation speeds up as her arms are drawn into her body.
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.
5. Generation
GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning.
What is it?
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.
Many people perceive their learning is most effective when it is experiential —that is, learning by doing rather than by reading a text or hearing a lecture. Experiential learning is a form of generation: you set out to accomplish a task, you encounter a problem, and you consult your creativity and storehouse of knowledge to try to solve it. If necessary, you seek answers from experts, texts, or the Web. 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.
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.
6. Reflection
REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.
What is it?
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?
For Instance:
The biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth assigns weekly low-stakes “learning paragraphs” in which students are asked to reflect on what they learned the previous week and to characterize how their class learning connects to life outside the class.
7. Calibration
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.
What is it?
Everyone is subject to a host of cognitive illusions, some of which are described in Chapter 5. Mistaking fluency with a text for mastery of the underlying content is just one example. Calibration is simply the act of using an objective instrument to clear away illusions and adjust your judgment to better reflect reality. The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate.
For Instance:
Airline pilots use flight instruments to know when their perceptual systems are misleading them about critical factors like whether the airplane is flying level. Students use quizzes and practice tests to see whether they know as much as they think they do. It’s worth being explicit here about the importance of answering the questions in the quizzes that you give yourself. Too often we will look at a question on a practice test and say to ourselves: Yup,
I know that, and then move down the page without making the effort to write in the answer. If you don’t supply the answer, you may be giving in to the illusion of knowing, when in fact you would have difficulty rendering an accurate or complete response.
8. Mnemonic Devices
MNEMONIC DEVICES help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory.
What is it?
“Mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory, and mnemonic devices are like mental file cabinets. They give you handy ways to store information and find it again when you need it.
For Instance:
Using memory palaces to remember bulk information need to recall upon later.
Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned.