intro

we mean acquiring knowledge and skills
and having them readily available from memory so you can
make sense of future problems and opportunities.
There are some immutable aspects of learning that we can
probably all agree on:
First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve
learned is still there later when we need it.
Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our
lives. We can’t advance through middle school without some
mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies.
Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and diffi cult
colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our
dotage, we move into simpler housing while we’re still able
to adapt. If you’re good at learning, you have an advantage in
life.
Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective
strategies are often counterintuitive.
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 3
Claims We Make in This Book
You may not agree with the last point, but we hope to persuade
you of it. Here, more or less unadorned in list form, are
some of the principal claims we make in support of our argument.
We set them forth more fully in the chapters that follow.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.
Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and
gone tomorrow.
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.
Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge
are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all
stripes, but they’re also among the least productive. By massed
practice we mean the single- minded, rapid- fi re repetition of
something you’re trying to burn into memory, the “practicepractice-
practice” of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams
is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to
feelings of fl uency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for
true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste
of time.
Retrieval practice— recalling facts or concepts or events
from memory— is a more effective learning strategy than review
by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example. Retrieval
strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single,
simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces
better learning and remembering than rereading the text or
reviewing lecture notes. 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
Make It Stick ê 4
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.
When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty
between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or
more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but
the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more
versatile application of it in later settings.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution
leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the
attempt.
The pop u lar notion that you learn better when you receive
instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning
style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported
by the empirical research. People do have multiple
forms of intelligence to bring to bear on learning, and you
learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes
and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or
experience to the style you fi nd most amenable.
When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles
or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more
successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations.
This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied
practice than massed practice. For instance, interleaving practice
at computing the volumes of different kinds of geometric
solids makes you more skilled at picking the right solution
when a later test presents a random solid. Interleaving the
identifi cation of bird types or the works of oil paint ers improves
your ability both to learn the unifying attributes within
a type and to differentiate between types, improving your
skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later.
We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment
of what we know and can do. Testing helps calibrate
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 5
our judgments of what we’ve learned. A pi lot who is responding
to a failure of hydraulic systems in a fl ight simulator discovers
quickly whether he’s on top of the corrective procedures
or not. 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.
All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
You need to know how to land a twin engine plane on two
engines before you can learn to land it on one. To learn trigonometry,
you need to remember your algebra and geometry. To
learn cabinetmaking, you need to have mastered the properties
of wood and composite materials, how to join boards, cut
rabbets, rout edges, and miter corners.
In a cartoon by the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, a bugeyed
school kid asks his teacher, “Mr. Osborne, can I be excused?
My brain is full!” If you’re just engaging in mechanical
repetition, it’s true, you quickly hit the 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
pro cess 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. Warm air can
hold more moisture than cold air; to know that this is true in
your own experience, you can think of the drip of water from
the back of an air conditioner or the way a stifl ing summer
day turns cooler out the back side of a sudden thunderstorm.
Evaporation has a cooling effect: you know this because a
humid day at your uncle’s in Atlanta feels hotter than a dry
one at your cousin’s in Phoenix, where your sweat disappears
even before your skin feels damp. When you study the
Make It Stick ê 6
principles of heat transfer, you understand conduction from
warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa; radiation
from the way the sun pools in the den on a wintry day; convection
from the life- saving blast of A/C as your uncle squires
you slowly through his favorite back alley haunts of Atlanta.
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning.
For example, the more of the unfolding story of history
you know, the more of it you can learn. And the more ways
you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding
of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the
better the story stays with you. Likewise, if you’re trying to
learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum,
it’s easier when you ground it in something concrete that you
already know, like the way a fi gure skater’s rotation speeds up
as she draws her arms to her chest.
People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material
and or ga nize them into a mental model and connect that
model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex
mastery. A mental model is a mental repre sen ta tion of
some external reality.1 Think of a baseball batter waiting for
a pitch. He has less than an instant to decipher whether it’s a
curveball, a changeup, or something else. How does he do it?
There are a few subtle signals that help: the way the pitcher
winds up, the way he throws, the spin of the ball’s seams. A
great batter winnows out all the extraneous perceptual distractions,
seeing only these variations in pitches, and through
practice he forms distinct mental models based on a different
set of cues for each kind of pitch. He connects these models to
what he knows about batting stance, strike zone, and swinging
so as to stay on top of the ball. These he connects to mental
models of player positions: if he’s got guys on fi rst and
second, maybe he’ll sacrifi ce to move the runners ahead. If
he’s got men on fi rst and third and there is one out, he’s got to
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 7
keep from hitting into a double play while still hitting to score
the runner. His mental models of player positions connect to
his models of the opposition (are they playing deep or shallow?)
and to the signals fl ying around from the dugout to the
base coaches to him. In a great at- bat, all these pieces come
together seamlessly: the batter connects with the ball and
drives it through a hole in the outfi eld, buying the time to get
on fi rst and advance his men. Because he has culled out all but
the most important elements for identifying and responding
to each kind of pitch, constructed mental models out of that
learning, and connected those models to his mastery of the
other essential elements of this complex game, an expert player
has a better chance of scoring runs than a less experienced
one who cannot make sense of the vast and changeable information
he faces every time he steps up to the plate.
Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired
from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge
is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn
something new, you change the brain— the residue of your
experiences is stored. It’s true that we start life with the gift of
our genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through
the learning and development of mental models that enable
us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements
that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent
within your own control. 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. The need to understand that when learning is
hard, you’re doing important work. To understand that 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 per for mance toward true expertise. Making mistakes and
correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.
Make It Stick ê 8
Empirical Evidence versus Theory,
Lore, and Intuition
Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on
learning theories that have been handed down to us, and
these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibility
drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches,
students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we
teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition.
But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists
have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what
works and to discover the strategies that get results.
Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding
how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how
people perceive, remember, and think. Many others have their
hands in the puzzle of learning as well. Developmental and
educational psychologists are concerned with theories of
human development and how they can be used to shape the
tools of education— such as testing regimes, instructional organizers
(for example topic outlines and schematic illustrations),
and resources for special groups like those in remedial
and gifted education. Neuroscientists, using new imaging techniques
and other tools, are advancing our understanding of
brain mechanisms that underlie learning, but we’re still a very
long way from knowing what neuroscience will tell us about
how to improve education.
How is one to know whose advice to take on how best to
go about learning?
It’s wise to be skeptical. Advice is easy to fi nd, only a few
mouse- clicks away. Yet not all advice is grounded in research—
far from it. Nor does all that passes as research meet the standards
of science, such as having appropriate control conditions
to assure that the results of an investigation are objective
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 9
and generalizable. The best empirical studies are experimental
in nature: the researcher develops a hypothesis and then tests
it through a set of experiments that must meet rigorous criteria
for design and objectivity. In the chapters that follow, we
have distilled the fi ndings of a large body of such studies that
have stood up under review by the scientifi c community before
being published in professional journals. We are collaborators
in some of these studies, but not the lion’s share. Where
we’re offering theory rather than scientifi cally validated results,
we say so. To make our points we use, in addition to
tested science, anecdotes from people like Matt Brown whose
work requires mastery of complex knowledge and skills, stories
that illustrate the underlying principles of how we learn
and remember. Discussion of the research studies themselves
is kept to a minimum, but you will fi nd many of them cited in
the notes at the end of the book if you care to dig further.
People Misunderstand Learning
It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teachers
and students isn’t serving us well, but some comparatively
simple changes could make a big difference. People commonly
believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—
say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade
biology class— you can burn it into memory. Not so. Many
teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster,
the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on
its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.
It’s widely believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the
most effective way to master a new skill is to give it dogged,
single- minded focus, practicing over and over until you’ve got
it down. Our faith in this runs deep, because most of us see
fast gains during the learning phase of massed practice. What’s
Make It Stick ê 10
apparent from the research is that gains achieved during
massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly.
The fi nding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain
ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners,
because it’s the number one study strategy of most people—
including more than 80 percent of college students in some
surveys—and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during
the hours we dedicate to learning. Rereading has three strikes
against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable
memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting selfdeception,
as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel
like mastery of the content. The hours immersed in rereading
can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is
no mea sure of mastery.2
You needn’t look far to fi nd training systems that lean
heavily on the conviction that mere exposure leads to learning.
Consider Matt Brown, the pi lot. When Matt was ready
to advance from piston planes, he had a whole new body of
knowledge to master in order to get certifi ed for the business
jet he was hired to pi lot. We asked him to describe this process.
His employer sent him to eigh teen days of training, ten
hours a day, in what Matt called the “fi re hose” method of
instruction. The fi rst seven days straight were spent in the
classroom being instructed in all the plane’s systems: electrical,
fuel, pneumatics, and so on, how these systems operated
and interacted, and all their fail- safe tolerances like pressures,
weights, temperatures, and speeds. Matt is required to have at
his immediate command about eighty different “memory action
items”— actions to take without hesitation or thought in
order to stabilize the plane the moment any one of a dozen or
so unexpected events occur. It might be a sudden decompression,
a thrust reverser coming unlocked in fl ight, an engine
failure, an electrical fi re.
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 11
Matt and his fellow pi lots gazed for hours at mindnumbing
PowerPoint illustrations of their airplane’s principal
systems. Then something interesting happened.
“About the middle of day fi ve,” Matt said, “they fl ash a
schematic of the fuel system on the screen, with its pressure
sensors, shutoff valves, ejector pumps, bypass lines, and on
and on, and you’re struggling to stay focused. Then this one
instructor asks us, ‘Has anybody here had the fuel fi lter bypass
light go on in fl ight?’ This pi lot across the room raises his
hand. So the instructor says, ‘Tell us what happened,’ and suddenly
you’re thinking, Whoa, what if that was me?
“So, this guy was at 33,000 feet or something and he’s
about to lose both engines because he got fuel without antifreeze
in it and his fi lters are clogging with ice. You hear that
story and, believe me, that schematic comes to life and sticks
with you. Jet fuel can commonly have a little water in it, and
when it gets cold at high altitude, the water will condense out,
and it can freeze and block the line. So whenever you refuel,
you make good and sure to look for a sign on the fuel truck
saying the fuel has Prist in it, which is an antifreeze. And if you
ever see that light go on in fl ight, you’re going to get yourself
down to some warmer air in a hurry.”3 Learning is stronger
when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and
personal.
Then the nature of Matt’s instruction shifted. The next
eleven days were spent in a mix of classroom and fl ight simulator
training. Here, Matt described the kind of active engagement
that leads to durable learning, as the pi lots had to
grapple with their aircraft to demonstrate mastery of standard
operating procedures, respond to unexpected situations,
and drill on the rhythm and physical memory of the movements
that are required in the cockpit for dealing with them.
A fl ight simulator provides retrieval practice, and the practice
Make It Stick ê 12
is spaced, interleaved, and varied and involves as far as possible
the same mental pro cesses Matt will invoke when he’s at
altitude. In a simulator, the abstract is made concrete and
personal. A simulator is also a series of tests, in that it helps
Matt and his instructors calibrate their judgment of where he
needs to focus to bring up his mastery.
In some places, like Matt Brown’s fl ight simulator, teachers
and trainers have found their way to highly effective learning
techniques, yet in virtually any fi eld, these techniques tend to
be the exception, and “fi re hose” lectures (or their equivalent)
are too often the norm.
In fact, what students are advised to do is often plain wrong.
For instance, study tips published on a website at George
Mason University include this advice: “The key to learning
something well is repetition; the more times you go over the
material the better chance you have of storing it permanently.”4
Another, from a Dartmouth College website, suggests: “If you
intend to remember something, you probably will.”5 A public
ser vice piece that runs occasionally in the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch offering study advice shows a kid with his nose
buried in a book. “Concentrate,” the caption reads. “Focus on
one thing and one thing only. Repeat, repeat, repeat! Repeating
what you have to remember can help burn it into your
memory.”6 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
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 13
common penny, only one of which is correct. As many times
as you’ve seen a penny, you’re hard pressed to say with confi -
dence which one it is. Similarly, a recent study asked faculty
and students who worked in the Psychology Building at UCLA
to identify the fi re extinguisher closest to their offi ce. Most
failed the test. One professor, who had been at UCLA for
twenty- fi ve years, left his safety class and decided to look for
the fi re extinguisher closest to his offi ce. He discovered that it
was actually right next to his offi ce door, just inches from the
doorknob he turned every time he went into his offi ce. Thus,
in this case, even years of repetitive exposure did not result in
his learning where to grab the closest extinguisher if his wastebasket
caught fi re.7
Early Evidence
The fallacy in thinking that repetitive exposure builds memory
has been well established through a series of investigations
going back to the mid- 1960s, when the psychologist
Endel Tulving at the University of Toronto began testing people
on their ability to remember lists of common En glish nouns. In
a fi rst phase of the experiment, the participants simply read a
list of paired items six times (for example, a pair on the list
might be “chair— 9”); they did not expect a memory test. The
fi rst item in each pair was always a noun. After reading the
listed pairs six times, participants were then told that they
would be getting a list of nouns that they would be asked to
remember. For one group of people, the nouns were the same
ones they had just read six times in the prior reading phase;
for another group, the nouns to be learned were different from
those they had previously read. Remarkably, Tulving found
that the two groups’ learning of the nouns did not differ— the
learning curves were statistically indistinguishable. Intuition
Make It Stick ê 14
would suggest otherwise, but prior exposure did not aid later
recall. Mere repetition did not enhance learning. Subsequent
studies by many researchers have pressed further into questions
of whether repeated exposure or longer periods of holding
an idea in mind contribute to later recall, and these studies
have confi rmed and elaborated on the fi ndings that repetition
by itself does not lead to good long- term memory.8
These results led researchers to investigate the benefi ts of
rereading texts. In a 2008 article in Contemporary Educational
Psychology, Washington University scientists reported
on a series of studies they conducted at their own school and
at the University of New Mexico to shed light on rereading as
a strategy to improve understanding and memory of prose.
Like most research, these studies stood on the shoulders of
earlier work by others; some showed that when the same text
is read multiple times the same inferences are made and the
same connections between topics are formed, and others suggested
modest benefi ts from rereading. These benefi ts had been
found in two different situations. In the fi rst, some students
read and immediately reread study material, whereas other
students read the material only once. Both groups took an immediate
test after reading, and the group who had read twice
performed a bit better than the group who had read once.
However, on a delayed test the benefi t of immediate rereading
had worn off, and the rereaders performed at the same level as
the one- time readers. In the other situation, students read the
material the fi rst time and then waited some days before they
reread it. This group, having done spaced readings of the text,
performed better on the test than the group who did not reread
the material.9
Subsequent experiments at Washington University, aimed
at teasing apart some of the questions the earlier studies had
raised, assessed the benefi ts of rereading among students of
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 15
differing abilities, in a learning situation paralleling that faced
by students in classes. A total of 148 students read fi ve different
passages taken from textbooks and Scientifi c American.
The students were at two different universities; some were
high- ability readers, and others were low- ability; some students
read the material only once, and others read it twice in
succession. Then all of them responded to questions to demonstrate
what they had learned and remembered.
In these experiments, multiple readings in close succession
did not prove to be a potent study method for either group,
at either school, in any of the conditions tested. In fact, the
researchers found no rereading benefi t at all under these
conditions.
What’s the conclusion? It makes sense to reread a text once
if there’s been a meaningful lapse of time since the fi rst reading,
but doing multiple readings in close succession is a timeconsuming
study strategy that yields negligible benefi ts at the
expense of much more effective strategies that take less time.
Yet surveys of college students confi rm what professors have
long known: highlighting, underlining, and sustained poring
over notes and texts are the most- used study strategies, by far.10
Illusions of Knowing
If rereading is largely in effec tive, why do students favor it?
One reason may be that they’re getting bad study advice. But
there’s another, subtler way they’re pushed toward this method
of review, the phenomenon mentioned earlier: rising familiarity
with a text and fl uency in reading it can create an illusion
of mastery. As any professor will attest, students work hard to
capture the precise wording of phrases they hear in class lectures,
laboring under the misapprehension that the essence of
the subject lies in the syntax in which it’s described. Mastering
Make It Stick ê 16
the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas
behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion
of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be
fooled. The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or
your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the
signifi cance of the precepts they describe, their application, or
how they relate to what you already know about the subject.
Too common is the experience of a college professor answering
a knock on her offi ce door only to fi nd a fi rst- year
student in distress, asking to discuss his low grade on the fi rst
test in introductory psychology. How is it possible? He attended
all the lectures and took diligent notes on them. He
read the text and highlighted the critical passages.
How did he study for the test? she asks.
Well, he’d gone back and highlighted his notes, and then
reviewed the highlighted notes and his highlighted text material
several times until he felt he was thoroughly familiar with
all of it. How could it be that he had pulled a D on the exam?
Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each
chapter to test himself? Could he look at a concept like “conditioned
stimulus,” defi ne it, and use it in a paragraph? While
he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points
of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to
answer them while he was studying? Had he at least rephrased
the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he
tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked
for examples outside the text? The answer was no in every
case.
He sees himself as the model student, diligent to a fault,
but the truth is he doesn’t know how to study effectively.
The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition:
what we know about what we know. Being accurate in
your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 17
for decision making. The problem was famously (and prophetically)
summed up by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld
in a 2002 press briefi ng about US intelligence on Iraq’s
possible possession of weapons of mass destruction: “There
are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things
that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown
unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t
know.”
The emphasis here is ours. We make it to drive home the
point that students who don’t quiz themselves (and most do
not) tend to overestimate how well they have mastered class
material. Why? When they hear a lecture or read a text that is
a paragon of clarity, the ease with which they follow the argument
gives them the feeling that they already know it and
don’t need to study it. In other words, they tend not to know
what they don’t know; when put to the test, they fi nd they
cannot recall the critical ideas or apply them in a new context.
Likewise, when they’ve reread their lecture notes and texts to
the point of fl uency, their fl uency gives them the false sense
that they’re in possession of the underlying content, principles,
and implications that constitute real learning, confi dent
that they can recall them at a moment’s notice. The upshot is
that even the most diligent students are often hobbled by two
liabilities: a failure to know the areas where their learning is
weak— that is, where they need to do more work to bring up
their knowledge— and a preference for study methods that
create a false sense of mastery.11
Knowledge: Not Suffi cient, but Necessary
Albert Einstein declared “creativity is more important than
knowledge,” and the sentiment appears to be widely shared by
Make It Stick ê 18
college students, if their choice in t-shirt proclamations is any
indication. And why wouldn’t they seize on the sentiment? It
embodies an obvious and profound truth, for without creativity
where would our scientifi c, social, or economic breakthroughs
come from? Besides which, accumulating knowledge
can feel like a grind, while creativity sounds like a lot more fun.
But of course the dichotomy is false. You wouldn’t want to see
that t-shirt on your neurosurgeon or on the captain who’s fl ying
your plane across the Pacifi c. But the sentiment has gained
some currency as a reaction to standardized testing, fearing
that this kind of testing leads to an emphasis on memorization
at the expense of high- level skills. Notwithstanding the pitfalls
of standardized testing, what we really ought to ask is how to
do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without
knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher- level
skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving. As
the psychologist Robert Sternberg and two colleagues put it,
“one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if
one does not know anything to apply.”12
Mastery in any fi eld, from cooking to chess to brain surgery,
is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding,
judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in
the practice of new skills, and of striving, refl ection, and mental
rehearsal. Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction
site with the supplies to put up a house. Building the house
requires not only knowledge of countless different fi ttings and
materials but conceptual understanding, too, of aspects like
the load- bearing properties of a header or roof truss system,
or the principles of energy transfer and conservation that will
keep the house warm but the roof deck cold so the own er
doesn’t call six months later with ice dam problems. Mastery
requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual
understanding of how to use it.
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 19
When Matt Brown had to decide whether or not to kill his
right engine he was problem solving, and he needed to know
from memory the procedures for fl ying with a dead engine
and the tolerances of his plane in order to predict whether he
would fall out of the air or be unable to straighten up for
landing. The would- be neurosurgeon in her fi rst year of med
school has to memorize the whole ner vous system, the whole
skeletal system, the whole muscular system, the humeral system.
If she can’t, she’s not going to be a neurosurgeon. Her
success will depend on diligence, of course, but also on fi nding
study strategies that will enable her to learn the sheer volume
of material required in the limited hours available.
Testing: Dipstick versus Learning Tool
There are few surer ways to raise the hackles of many students
and educators than talking about testing. The growing
focus over recent years on standardized assessment, in partic
u lar, has turned testing into a lightning rod for frustration
over how to achieve the country’s education goals. Online
forums and news articles are besieged by readers who charge
that emphasis on testing favors memorization at the expense
of a larger grasp of context or creative ability; that testing creates
extra stress for students and gives a false mea sure of ability;
and so on. But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick
to mea sure 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.
One of the most striking research fi ndings is the power of
active retrieval— testing—to strengthen memory, and that the
more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefi t. Think
fl ight simulator versus PowerPoint lecture. Think quiz versus
Make It Stick ê 20
rereading. The act of retrieving learning from memory has
two profound benefi ts. One, it tells you what you know and
don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to
improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what
you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory,
which strengthens its connections to what you already
know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In
effect, retrieval— testing—interrupts forgetting. Consider an
eighth grade science class. For the class in question, at a middle
school in Columbia, Illinois, researchers arranged for part
of the material covered during the course to be the subject of
low- stakes quizzing (with feedback) at three points in the semester.
Another part of the material was never quizzed but
was studied three times in review. In a test a month later,
which material was better recalled? The students averaged
A- on the material that was quizzed and C+ on the material
that was not quizzed but reviewed.13
In Matt Brown’s case, even after ten years pi loting the
same business jet, his employer reinforces his mastery every
six months in a battery of tests and fl ight simulations that require
him to retrieve the information and maneuvers that are
essential to stay in control of his plane. As Matt points out,
you hardly ever have an emergency, so if you don’t practice
what to do, there’s no way to keep it fresh.
Both of these cases— the research in the classroom and the
experience of Matt Brown in updating his knowledge— point
to the critical role of retrieval practice in keeping our knowledge
accessible to us when we need it. The power of active
retrieval is the topic of Chapter 2.14
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 21
The Takeaway
For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong
ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming
up behind us. A great deal of what we think we know about
how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does
not hold up under empirical research. Per sis tent illusions of
knowing lead us to labor at unproductive strategies; as
recounted in Chapter 3, this is true even of people who have
participated in empirical studies and seen the evidence for
themselves, fi rsthand. Illusions are potent persuaders. One
of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular selfquizzing
to recalibrate her understanding of what she does
and does not know. Second Lieutenant Kiley Hunkler, a 2013
graduate of West Point and winner of a Rhodes Scholarship,
whom we write about in Chapter 8, uses the phrase “shooting
an azimuth” to describe how she takes practice tests to help
refocus her studying. In overland navigation, shooting an azimuth
means climbing to a height, sighting an object on the
horizon in the direction you’re traveling, and adjusting your
compass heading to make sure you’re still gaining on your
objective as you beat through the forest below.
The good news is that we now know of simple and practical
strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn
better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice,
such as low- stakes quizzing and self- testing, spacing out
practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics
or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the
solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate
types of problems, and so on. In the chapters that
follow we describe these in depth. And because learning is an
iterative pro cess that requires that you revisit what you have
Make It Stick ê 22
learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with
new knowledge, we circle through these topics several times
along the way. At the end, in Chapter 8, we pull it all together
with specifi c tips and examples for putting these tools
to work.