Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Make It Stick
Make It Stick
make it stick
The Science of Successful Learning
Peter C. Brown
Henry L. Roediger III
Mark A. McDaniel
T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S of H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2014
Copyright © 2014 by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III,
Mark A. McDaniel
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound
Contents
Preface ix
1 Learning Is Misunderstood 1
2 To Learn, Retrieve 23
4 Embrace Difficulties 67
Notes 257
Suggested Reading 285
Acknowledgments 289
Index 295
Preface
ix
Preface ê x
The reader will remember them better and use them more ef-
fectively as a result.
This is a book about what people can do for themselves
right now in order to learn better and remember longer. The
responsibility for learning rests with every individual. Teach-
ers and coaches, too, can be more effective right now by help-
ing students understand these principles and by designing them
into the learning experience. This is not a book about how
education policy or the school system ought to be reformed.
Clearly, though, there are policy implications. For example,
college professors at the forefront of applying these strategies
in the classroom have experimented with their potential for
narrowing the achievement gap in the sciences, and the results
of those studies are eye opening.
We write for students and teachers, of course, and for all
readers for whom effective learning is a high priority: for train-
ers in business, industry, and the military; for leaders of profes-
sional associations offering in-service training to their mem-
bers; and for coaches. We also write for lifelong learners nearing
middle age or older who want to hone their skills so as to stay
in the game.
While much remains to be known about learning and its
neural underpinnings, a large body of research has yielded
principles and practical strategies that can be put to work im-
mediately, at no cost, and to great effect.
M A K E I T ST ICK
1
Learning Is Misunderstood
1
Make It Stick ê 2
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 shal-
low?) and to the signals flying 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 outfield, buying the time to get
on first 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 infor-
mation he faces every time he steps up to the plate.
Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hard-
wired 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 en-
ables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of
useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a differ-
ent strategy. The need to understand that when learning is
hard, you’re doing important work. To understand that striv-
ing 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.
Make It Stick ê 8
Early Evidence
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 ques-
tions of whether repeated exposure or longer periods of hold-
ing an idea in mind contribute to later recall, and these studies
have confirmed and elaborated on the findings that repetition
by itself does not lead to good long-term memory.8
These results led researchers to investigate the benefits of
rereading texts. In a 2008 article in Contemporary Educa-
tional 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 sug-
gested modest benefits from rereading. These benefits had been
found in two different situations. In the first, some students
read and immediately reread study material, whereas other
students read the material only once. Both groups took an im-
mediate 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 benefit 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 first 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 re-
read the material.9
Subsequent experiments at Washington University, aimed
at teasing apart some of the questions the earlier studies had
raised, assessed the benefits of rereading among students of
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 15
Illusions of Knowing
the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas
behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illu-
sion 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
significance 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 an-
swering a knock on her office door only to find a first-year
student in distress, asking to discuss his low grade on the first
test in introductory psychology. How is it possible? He at-
tended 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 mate-
rial 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 “con-
ditioned stimulus,” define 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 re-
phrased 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 metacogni-
tion: 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
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. Persistent 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, firsthand. Illusions are potent persuaders. One
of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-
quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does
and does not know. 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 azi-
muth 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 prac-
tice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out
practice, interleaving the practice of different but related top-
ics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the
solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that dif-
ferentiate types of problems, and so on. In the chapters that
follow we describe these in depth. And because learning is an
iterative process that requires that you revisit what you have
Make It Stick ê 22
To Learn, Retrieve
23
Make It Stick ê 24
It turned out that the bullet and bone were lodged in the vein,
serving as plugs, another lucky turn for the hunter. If the
wound hadn’t corked itself in the field, he would not have
lived for more than two or three minutes. When Ebersold re-
moved the bullet, the fractured bone chips fell away, and the
vein let loose in a torrent. “Within five minutes, you’ve lost
two or so units of blood and now you sort of transfer out of
the mode where you’re thinking through this, going through
the options. Now it becomes reflex, mechanical. You know it’s
going to bleed very, very much, so you have a very short time.
You’re just thinking, ‘I have to get a suture around this struc-
ture, and I know from previous experience I have to do it in
this particular way.’ ”
The vein in question, which is about the size of an adult’s
small finger, was torn in several places over a distance of about
an inch and a half. It needed to be tied off above and below
the rupture, but it’s a flat structure that he knows well: you
Make It Stick ê 26
can’t just put a stitch around it, because when you tighten it,
the tissue tears, and the ligature leaks. Working urgently and
mechanically, he fell back on a technique he’d developed out
of necessity in past surgeries involving this vein. He cut two
little pieces of muscle, from where the patient’s skin had been
opened up in surgery, and imported them to the site and
stitched the ends of the torn vein to them. These plugs of
muscle served to close the vein without deflecting its natural
shape or tearing its tissue. It’s a solution Mike has taught
himself—one he says you won’t find written anywhere, but
handy in the moment, to say the least. In the sixty or so sec-
onds it took to do, the patient lost another two hundred cubic
centimeters of blood, but once the plugs were in place, the
bleeding stopped. “Some people can’t tolerate this sinus vein
being closed off. They get increased brain pressure because
the blood doesn’t drain properly. But this patient was one of
the fortunate who can.” The hunter left the hospital a week
later. He was minus some peripheral vision but otherwise re-
markably unscathed from a very close brush with mortality.
next day back, I’d try that and see if it worked better. Or even
if it wasn’t the next day, at least I’ve thought through this, and
in so doing I’ve not only revisited things that I learned from
lectures or from watching others performing surgery but also
I’ve complemented that by adding something of my own to it
that I missed during the teaching process.
had taken a test, the forgetting nearly stopped, and the stu-
dent’s score on subsequent tests dropped very little.5
Around 1940, interest turned to the study of forgetting,
and investigating the potential of testing as a form of retrieval
practice and as a learning tool fell out of favor. So did the use
of testing as a research tool: since testing interrupts forgetting,
you can’t use it to measure forgetting because that “contami-
nates” the subject.
Interest in the testing effect resurfaced in 1967 with the
publication of a study showing that research subjects who
were presented with lists of thirty-six words learned as much
from repeated testing after initial exposure to the words as
they did from repeated studying. These results—that testing
led to as much learning as studying did—challenged the re-
ceived wisdom, turned researchers’ attention back to the po-
tential of testing as a learning tool, and stimulated a boomlet
in testing research.
In 1978, researchers found that massed studying (cram-
ming) leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results
in faster forgetting compared to practicing retrieval. In a sec-
ond test two days after an initial test, the crammers had for-
gotten 50 percent of what they had been able to recall on the
initial test, while those who had spent the same period prac-
ticing retrieval instead of studying had forgotten only 13 per-
cent of the information recalled initially.
A subsequent study was aimed at understanding what ef-
fect taking multiple tests would have on subjects’ long-term
retention. Students heard a story that named sixty concrete
objects. Those students who were tested immediately after
exposure recalled 53 percent of the objects on this initial test
but only 39 percent a week later. On the other hand, a group
of students who learned the same material but were not tested
at all until a week later recalled 28 percent. Thus, taking a
single test boosted performance by 11 percent after a week.
Make It Stick ê 32
Exploring Nuances
Andy Sobel’s example is anecdotal and likely reflects a variety
of beneficial influences, not least being the cumulative learn-
ing effects that accrue like compounded interest when course
material is carried forward in a regime of quizzes across an
entire semester. Nonetheless, his experience squares with em-
pirical research designed to tease apart the effects and nu-
ances of testing.
For example, in one experiment college students studied
prose passages on various scientific topics like those taught in
college and then either took an immediate recall test after the
initial exposure or restudied the material. After a delay of two
days, the students who took the initial test recalled more of
the material than those who simply restudied it (68 v. 54 per-
cent), and this advantage was sustained a week later (56 v. 42
percent). Another experiment found that after one week a
study-only group showed the most forgetting of what they ini-
tially had been able to recall, forgetting 52 percent, compared
to a repeated-testing group, who forgot only 10 percent.11
The Takeaway
Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is
a potent tool for learning and durable retention. This is true
for anything the brain is asked to remember and call up again
in the future—facts, complex concepts, problem-solving tech-
niques, motor skills.
Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and reten-
tion. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better
when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: 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. After an initial test,
delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for rein-
forcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed
retrieval requires more effort.
Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable
but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily,
in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of
problems.
Make It Stick ê 44
46
Mix Up Your Practice ê 47
Spaced Practice
The benefits of spacing out practice sessions are long estab-
lished, but for a vivid example consider this study of thirty-
eight surgical residents. They took a series of four short
lessons in microsurgery: how to reattach tiny vessels. Each
lesson included some instruction followed by some prac-
tice. Half the docs completed all four lessons in a single day,
which is the normal in-service schedule. The others completed
the same four lessons but with a week’s interval between
them.3
In a test given a month after their last session, those whose
lessons had been spaced a week apart outperformed their col-
leagues in all areas—elapsed time to complete a surgery, num-
ber of hand movements, and success at reattaching the sev-
ered, pulsating aortas of live rats. The difference in performance
between the two groups was impressive. The residents who
had taken all four sessions in a single day not only scored
lower on all measures, but 16 percent of them damaged the
Mix Up Your Practice ê 49
Interleaved Practice
Interleaving the practice of two or more subjects or skills is
also a more potent alternative to massed practice, and here’s a
quick example of that. Two groups of college students were
taught how to find the volumes of four obscure geometric
solids (wedge, spheroid, spherical cone, and half cone). One
group then worked a set of practice problems that were clus-
tered by problem type (practice four problems for computing
the volume of a wedge, then four problems for a spheroid,
etc.). The other group worked the same practice problems,
but the sequence was mixed (interleaved) rather than clustered
by type of problem. Given what we’ve already presented, the
results may not surprise you. During practice, the students
who worked the problems in clusters (that is, massed) averaged
89 percent correct, compared to only 60 percent for those
who worked the problems in a mixed sequence. But in the
Make It Stick ê 50
final test a week later, the students who had practiced solving
problems clustered by type averaged only 20 percent correct,
while the students whose practice was interleaved averaged
63 percent. The mixing of problem types, which boosted final
test performance by a remarkable 215 percent, actually im-
peded performance during initial learning.4
Now, suppose you’re a trainer in a company trying to teach
employees a complicated new process that involves ten proce-
dures. The typical way of doing this is to train up in proce-
dure 1, repeating it many times until the trainees really seem to
have it down cold. Then you go to procedure 2, you do many
repetitions of 2, you get that down, and so on. That appears
to produce fast learning. What would interleaved practice look
like? You practice procedure 1 just a few times, then switch to
procedure 4, then switch to 3, then to 7, and so on. (Chapter
8 tells how Farmers Insurance trains new agents in a spiraling
series of exercises that cycle back to key skillsets in a seem-
ingly random sequence that adds layers of context and mean-
ing at each turn.)
The learning from interleaved practice feels slower than
learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense
the difference. They can see that their grasp of each element is
coming more slowly, and the compensating long-term advan-
tage is not apparent to them. As a result, interleaving is unpop-
ular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels slug-
gish. Students find it confusing: they’re just starting to get a
handle on new material and don’t feel on top of it yet when
they are forced to switch. But the research shows unequivo-
cally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if
you interleave practice than if you mass it.
Mix Up Your Practice ê 51
Varied Practice
Okay, what about the beanbag study where the kids who did
best had never practiced the three-foot toss that the other kids
had only practiced?
The beanbag study focused on mastery of motor skills, but
much evidence has shown that the underlying principle ap-
plies to cognitive learning as well. The basic idea is that varied
practice—like tossing your beanbags into baskets at mixed
distances—improves your ability to transfer learning from
one situation and apply it successfully to another. You develop
a broader understanding of the relationships between different
conditions and the movements required to succeed in them;
you discern context better and develop a more flexible “move-
ment vocabulary”—different movements for different situa-
tions. Whether the scope of variable training (e.g., the two-
and four-foot tosses) must encompass the particular task (the
three-foot toss) is subject for further study.
The evidence favoring variable training has been supported
by recent neuroimaging studies that suggest that different kinds
of practice engage different parts of the brain. The learning of
motor skills from varied practice, which is more cognitively
challenging than massed practice, appears to be consolidated
in an area of the brain associated with the more difficult pro-
cess of learning higher-order motor skills. The learning of mo-
tor skills from massed practice, on the other hand, appears to
be consolidated in a different area of the brain that is used for
learning more cognitively simple and less challenging motor
skills. The inference is that learning gained through the less
challenging, massed form of practice is encoded in a simpler
or comparatively impoverished representation than the learn-
ing gained from the varied and more challenging practice
Make It Stick ê 52
The Takeaway
Here’s a quick rundown of what we know today about massed
practice and its alternatives. Scientists will continue to deepen
our understanding.
We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through
single-minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs
are validated time and again by the visible improvement that
comes during “practice-practice-practice.” But scientists call
this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a
skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying
habit strength.” The very techniques that build habit strength,
like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisi-
tion and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that
helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts.12
Cramming, a form of massed practice, has been likened to
binge-and-purge eating. A lot goes in, but most of it comes
right back out in short order. The simple act of spacing out
study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse
between them makes both the learning and the memory stron-
ger, in effect building habit strength.
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. The time periods between sessions of practice
let memories consolidate. Sleep seems to play a large role in
Make It Stick ê 64
Embrace Difficulties
67
Make It Stick ê 68
you release and execute the PLF. You practice falling to the
right and left, forward and backward, mixing it up.
The difficulty is increased again. You climb to a platform
twelve feet off the ground, where you practice strapping on
your harness, checking gear using the buddy system, and jump-
ing through a mockup of an airplane jump door. The harness
has risers like those from a parachute, hooked to a zip line
but allowing for the same long arc of suspension, and when
you jump, you have the momentary downward sensation of
free fall, followed by the broad oscillations of suspension as
you move along the cable, getting familiar with the motions
of a real jump. But at the bottom it’s the instructor, not you,
who pulls the release and drops you the last two or three feet
to earth, so now you’re executing your fall randomly, from all
directions, simulating what’s to come.
Next, you climb a thirty-four-foot tower to practice all the
elements of a jump and the choreography of a mass exit from
the aircraft, learning how it feels to fall from a height, how to
deal with equipment malfunctions, how to jump with a load
of heavy combat equipment.
Through demonstration and simulation, in escalating lev-
els of difficulty that must be mastered in order to progress
from one to the next, you learn how to board the aircraft as a
part of a jump crew and participate in the command sequence
of thirty troops positioning for a mass exit over a drop zone.
How to get out the jump door correctly, how to count one-
thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand, four-thousand and
feel your chute deploy, or if you get to six-thousand, to pull
the cord on your reserve chute; how to deal with twisted sus-
pension lines, avoid collisions, hold into the wind, sort out a
tangled control line; how to avoid stealing air from another
jumper; the contingencies for landing in trees, water, or power
Embrace Difficulties ê 71
Encoding
locker you used when you suited up at the gym today; re-
membering to stop for an oil change after your workout. But
the experiences and learning that we want to salt away for the
future must be made stronger and more durable—in Mia’s
case, the distinctive moves that will enable her to hit the ground
without breaking an ankle, or worse.3
Consolidation
a day or two later, what you want to say has become clearer
in your mind. Perhaps you now perceive that there are three
main points you are making. You connect them to examples
and supporting information familiar to your audience. You
rearrange and draw together the elements of your argument
to make it more effective and elegant.
Similarly, the process of learning something often starts out
feeling disorganized and unwieldy; the most important aspects
are not always salient. Consolidation helps organize and solid-
ify 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 recon-
solidation. This is how retrieval practice modifies and strength-
ens learning.
Suppose that on day 2 of jump school, you’re put on the
spot to execute your parachute landing fall and you struggle
to recall the correct posture and compose yourself—feet and
knees together, knees slightly bent, eyes on the horizon—but
in the reflex to break your fall you throw your arm out, for-
getting to pull your elbows tight to your sides. You could have
broken the arm or dislocated your shoulder if this were the
real deal. This effort to reconstruct what you learned the day
before is ragged, but in making it, critical elements of the ma-
neuver come clearer and are reconsolidated for stronger mem-
ory. If you’re practicing something over and over in rapid-fire
fashion, whether it’s your parachute landing fall or the conju-
gation of foreign verbs, you’re leaning on short-term memory,
and very little mental effort is required. You show gratifying
improvement rather quickly, but you haven’t done much to
strengthen the underlying representation of those skills. Your
performance in the moment is not an indication of durable
Embrace Difficulties ê 75
learning. On the other hand, 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
Retrieval
sheet and relearn how to tie a bowline. You put a small loop
in the rope and then take the short end and draw it through,
silently reciting the little memory device you were given: the
rabbit comes up from his hole, goes around the tree, and goes
back down. Retrieval again. A little snugging-up, and there
you have your knot, a dandy piece of scoutcraft of the kind
you’d always fancied knowing. Later, you put a piece of rope
beside the chair where you watch TV and practice the bow-
line during commercials. You are doing spaced practice. Over
the coming weeks you’re surprised at how many little jobs are
easier if you have a piece of rope with a loop in the end. More
spaced practice. By August you have discovered every possi-
ble use and purpose in your life for the bowline knot.
Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold
significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with
us. If you know you’re soon to throw yourself out of a troop
transport, you listen up good when they’re telling you when
and how to pull the rip cord on your reserve chute, or what
can go wrong at twelve hundred feet and how to “just sort of
swim out of it.” 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.
with the ball, but they agreed to take extra batting practice
twice a week, following two different practice regimens, to
see which type of practice produced better results.
Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest skills in sports. It
takes less than half a second for a ball to reach home plate. In
this instant, the batter must execute a complex combination
of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills: determining the
type of pitch, anticipating how the ball will move, and aiming
and timing the swing to arrive at the same place and moment
as the ball. This chain of perceptions and responses must be so
deeply entrenched as to become automatic, because the ball is
in the catcher’s mitt long before you can even begin to think
your way through how to connect with it.
Part of the Cal Poly team practiced in the standard way.
They practiced hitting forty-five pitches, evenly divided into
three sets. Each set consisted of one type of pitch thrown
fifteen times. For example, the first set would be fifteen fast-
balls, the second set fifteen curveballs, and the third set fif-
teen changeups. This was a form of massed practice. For each
set of 15 pitches, as the batter saw more of that type, he got
gratifyingly better at anticipating the balls, timing his swings,
and connecting. Learning seemed easy.
The rest of the team were given a more difficult practice
regimen: the three types of pitches were randomly interspersed
across the block of forty-five throws. For each pitch, the bat-
ter had no idea which type to expect. At the end of the forty-
five swings, he was still struggling somewhat to connect with
the ball. These players didn’t seem to be developing the profi-
ciency their teammates were showing. The interleaving and
spacing of different pitches made learning more arduous and
feel slower.
The extra practice sessions continued twice weekly for six
weeks. At the end, when the players’ hitting was assessed, the
Embrace Difficulties ê 81
Broadening Mastery
Improving Versatility
bicycle. The other kids were simply asked how they had gone
about trying to solve the anagrams. Then both groups were
given a difficult test whose results provided a measure of
working memory. The kids who had been taught that errors
are a natural part of learning showed significantly better use
of working memory than did the others. These children did not
expend their working memory capacity in agonizing over the
difficulty of the task. The theory was further tested in varia-
tions of the original study. The results support the finding that
difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender
anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do
better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”17
These studies point out that not all difficulties in learning
are desirable ones. Anxiety while taking a test seems to repre-
sent an undesirable difficulty. These studies also underscore
the importance of learners understanding that difficulty in
learning new things is not only to be expected but can be ben-
eficial. To this point, the French study stands on the shoulders
of many others, among the foremost being the works of Carol
Dweck and of Anders Ericsson, both of whom we discuss in
Chapter 7 in relation to the topic of increasing intellectual
abilities. Dweck’s work shows that people who believe that
their intellectual ability is fixed from birth, wired in their
genes, tend to avoid challenges at which they may not succeed,
because failure would appear to be an indication of lesser na-
tive ability. By contrast, people who are helped to understand
that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intel-
lectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control,
are more likely to tackle difficult challenges and persist at
them. They view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the
road rather than as a measure of inability and the end of the
road. Anders Ericsson’s work investigating the nature of expert
performance shows that to achieve expertise requires thou-
Embrace Difficulties ê 93
how they had achieved the desired effect. It was the posses-
sive pronoun, my process, that affirmed Bonnie in her head-
long rush to learn by doing. The notion is that every gardener’s
process is uniquely his or her own. Bonnie’s process did not
involve taking direction from experts, much less mastering
the Linnaean taxonomy or the Latin names of what she stuck
in holes and dragged her water hose to. But as she thrashed
around, working to achieve in dirt the magical spaces that
danced in her mind, she came to Latin and Linnaeus despite
herself.
“You begin to discover that the Latin names are helpful.
They can give you a shortcut to understanding the nature of
the plants, and they can help you remember. Tardiva, which
is a species name, comes after hydrangea, which is a genus.”
Bonnie had taken Latin in high school, along with French,
and of course English, and the cues to those memories began
to reawaken. “I can easily see that tardiva means late, like
tardy. The same word comes after many plant varieties, so
you see the genus and then the species is tardiva, and now
you know that particular plant is a late bloomer. So you be-
gin to realize that the Latin names are a way of helping you
remember, and you find yourself using them more and more.
Also you remember plants better, because it’s second nature
to you that procumbus means prostrate, crawling on the
ground. It makes sense. So now it’s not so hard to remember
that particular species name when it’s attached to a genus.
It’s also important to know the Latin names because then
you can be absolutely specific about a plant. Plants have
common names, and common names are regional. Actaea
racemosa has a common name of black cohosh, but it’s also
known as snakeroot, and those names are often given to
other plants. There’s only one Actaea racemosa.” Gradually,
and despite her inclination to resist, she came to grasp the
Make It Stick ê 98
Undesirable Difficulties
Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, who coined the phrase “desirable
difficulties,” write that difficulties are desirable because “they
trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning,
comprehension, and remembering. If, however, the learner
does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond
to them successfully, they become undesirable difficulties.”19
Cognitive scientists know from empirical studies that testing,
spacing, interleaving, variation, generation, and certain kinds
of contextual interference lead to stronger learning and reten-
tion. Beyond that, we have an intuitive sense of what kinds of
difficulties are undesirable but, for lack of the needed research,
we cannot yet be definitive.
Embrace Difficulties ê 99
The Takeaway
Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of
information is held in short-term working memory before be-
ing consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge
in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabi-
lizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes con-
nections to past experiences and to other knowledge already
stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and
enables 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 weak-
ening 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
Embrace Difficulties ê 101
102
Avoid Illusions of Knowing ê 103
So I walk up with the package and I say, “Hey, sir, did you
order some food?” He says, “Yup,” and I’m thinking this guy’s
really just going to pay me and I’m going to be out of here,
Make It Stick ê 104
and this is going to be the dumbest thing we’ve ever done. I’m
thinking if he hands me $40, I don’t even know how much
this food is. But he turns his head to look halfway back and
two other guys start to come up, and as they’re walking to-
wards me they flip hoods over their heads. That’s when I
know it’s game time. The first guy whips a gun out of his
pocket and racks it and puts it to my head all in one motion,
saying, “Give me everything you’ve got motherfucker or I’ll
kill you.” I ended up shooting him through the bag. It was
four rounds.2
Not such a great livelihood after all. The guy was hit low
and survived, although he is a lesser man as a result. Garman
would have aimed higher if the food package hadn’t been so
heavy, and he took a lesson from the experience: he’s better
prepared for the next time, though he’d rather we didn’t de-
scribe just how.
We like to think we’re smarter than the average doodle,
and even if we’re not, we feel affirmed in this delusion each
year when the newest crop of Darwin Awards circulates by
email, that short list of self-inflicted fatalities caused by spec-
tacularly poor judgment, as in the case of the attorney in To-
ronto who was demonstrating the strength of the windows in
his twenty-two-story office tower by throwing his shoulder
against the glass when he broke it and fell through. The truth
is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment. Good
judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute
observer of one’s own thinking and performance. We start at
a disadvantage for several reasons. One is that when we’re
incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see
little reason to change. Another is that, as humans, we are read-
ily misled by illusions, cognitive biases, and the stories we con-
struct to explain the world around us and our place within
Avoid Illusions of Knowing ê 105
deceleration, but not the extent to which the plane had en-
tered a right bank; his System 1 clue would have been his
vestibular reflex—how the inner ear senses balance and
spatial orientation—but because of the plane’s trajectory,
he had the sensation of flying level. His System 2 clues would
have been a glimpse at the horizon and his instruments. Cor-
rect procedure called for applying left rudder to help raise the
right wing, but his System 2 focus was on the airspeed indica-
tor and on the efforts of the first officer and engineer to re-
start the engine.
As its bank increased, the plane descended through 37,000
feet into high clouds, which obscured the horizon. The cap-
tain switched off the autopilot and pushed the nose down to
get more speed, but the plane had already rolled beyond 45
degrees and now turned upside down and fell into an uncon-
trolled descent. The crew were confused by the situation. They
understood the plane was behaving erratically but were un-
aware they had overturned and were in a dive. They could no
longer discern thrust from engines 1–3 and concluded those
engines had quit as well. The plane’s dive was evident from
their flight gauges, but the angle was so unlikely the crew de-
cided the gauges had failed. At 11,000 feet they broke through
the clouds, astonished to see that they were roaring toward
earth. The captain and first officer both pulled back hard on
the stick, exerting enormous forces on the plane but manag-
ing to level off. Landing gear hung from the plane’s belly, and
they’d lost one of their hydraulic systems, but all four engines
came to life, and the captain was able to fly on, diverting suc-
cessfully to San Francisco. An inspection revealed just how
severe their maneuver had been. Strains five times the force of
gravity had bent the plane’s wings permanently upward, bro-
ken two landing gear struts, and torn away two landing gear
doors and large parts of the rear horizontal stabilizers.
Make It Stick ê 108
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. To use an analogy from
a previous chapter, you could think of them as something
like smart-phone apps in the brain. We call them mental mod-
els. Two examples in police work are the choreography of the
routine traffic stop and the moves to take a weapon from an
assailant at close quarters. Each of these maneuvers involves a
set of perceptions and actions that cops can adapt with little
conscious thought in response to context and situation. For a
barista, a mental model would be the steps and ingredients to
produce a perfect sixteen-ounce decaf frappuccino. For the
receptionist at urgent care, it’s triage and registration.
Avoid Illusions of Knowing ê 119
The good players are picked first, the worst last. You learn
your peers’ judgments of your softball abilities in a very pub-
lic manner, so it would be hard for the last-picked player to
think “I must be really good at softball.” However, most
realms of life do not render such stark judgments of ability.17
that needs more work. But few students practice these strate-
gies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if
they are to practice them effectively: It turns out that even
when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior
strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the last-
ing benefit. For example, when students are presented with a
body of material to master, say a stack of foreign vocabulary
flashcards, and are free to decide when to drop a card out of
the deck because they’ve learned it, most students drop the
card when they’ve gotten it right once or twice, far sooner
than they should. 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.
The football player preparing for next Saturday’s game
doesn’t leave his performance to intuition, he runs through his
plays and mixes it up to discover the rough edges and work
them out on the field well before suiting up for the big game.
If this kind of behavior were anywhere close to the norm for
students in their academics today, then self-directed learning
would be highly effective. But of course the football player is
not self-directed, his practice is guided by a coach. Likewise,
most students will learn academics better under an instructor
who knows where improvement is needed and structures the
practice required to achieve it.19
The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace sub-
jective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of ob-
jective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares
with the real world around us. When we have reliable refer-
ence points, like cockpit instruments, and make a habit of
checking them, we can make good decisions about where to
focus our efforts, recognize when we’ve lost our bearings, and
find our way back again. Here are some examples.
Avoid Illusions of Knowing ê 125
Pay attention to the cues you’re using to judge what you have
learned. Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not al-
ways a reliable indicator of learning. Neither is your level of
ease in retrieving a fact or a phrase on a quiz shortly after
encountering it in a lecture or text. (Ease of retrieval after a
delay, however, is a good indicator of learning.) Far better is
to create a mental model of the material that integrates the
various ideas across a text, connects them to what you al-
ready know, and enables you to draw inferences. How ably
you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging compre-
hension, 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.
One was a traffic stop. The training room had the screen at
one end and objects around the room—a big blue mailbox, a
fire hydrant, a doorway—that you could use for cover in deal-
ing with what was happening on the screen. I remember walk-
ing toward the screen, and the video simulating my coming up
to the car as I did that, very realistic, and suddenly the trunk
popped up and a guy with a shotgun rose out and shot me.
Avoid Illusions of Knowing ê 129
gun free with the other. It’s a move that officers had been in the
habit of honing through repetition, taking the gun, handing it
back, taking it again. Until one of their officers, on a call in
the field, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right
back again. In their mutual astonishment, the officer managed
to reseize the gun and hang onto it. The training regime had
violated the cardinal rule that you should practice like you
play, 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 recep-
tive to the lesson.23
6
131
Make It Stick ê 132
some learn better from visual materials, and others learn better
from written text or auditory materials. Moreover, the theory
holds that people who receive instruction in a manner that is
not matched to their learning style are at a disadvantage for
learning.
In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning
preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better
when the manner of instruction fits those preferences. Yet there
are other kinds of differences in how people learn that do
matter. First, the story of Bruce, to help frame our argument.
the different railroads and decided that the best one to invest
in was the Erie Lackawanna, because it had the most modern
equipment when it filed for bankruptcy. Hendry, Leppla, and
Donahue dived in for a closer look. They traveled the entire
length of the Erie’s track to check its condition. They counted
the equipment that remained, looked at its condition, and
checked in Moody’s transportation manuals to calculate val-
ues. “You just do the arithmetic: What’s an engine worth?
A boxcar? A mile of track?” The Erie had issued fifteen differ-
ent bonds over its 150 years in operation, and the value of each
bond was dependent in part on where it stood in seniority
compared to the others. Bruce’s research turned up a little
document in which the financial institutions had agreed to the
sequence in which bonds were to be paid off when the assets
were liquidated. With a fix on the value of the company’s as-
sets, liabilities, and the bond structure, they knew what each
class of bonds was worth. Bondholders who hadn’t done this
homework were in the dark. Junior bonds were selling at
steeply discounted prices because they were so far down the
food chain that investors doubted they would ever see their
money. Bruce’s calculations suggested otherwise, and he was
buying.
It’s a longer story than we have space to tell. A railroad
bankruptcy is an astonishingly convoluted affair. Bruce com-
mitted himself to understanding the entirety of the process
better than anybody else. Then he knocked on doors, chal-
lenged the good-old-boys’ power structure that was manag-
ing the proceedings, and eventually succeeded in getting ap-
pointed by the courts to chair the committee that represented
the bondholders’ interests in the bankruptcy process. When
the Erie came out of bankruptcy two years later, he was made
chairman and CEO of the company. He hired Barney Dona-
hue to run it. Hendry, Donahue, and the board guided the
Make It Stick ê 138
Successful Intelligence
Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters,
but what exactly is it? Every human society has a concept that
corresponds to the idea of intelligence in our culture. The
problem of how to define and measure intelligence in a way
that accounts for people’s intellectual horsepower and pro-
vides a fair indicator of their potential has been with us for
over a hundred years, with psychologists trying to measure
this construct since early in the twentieth century. Psycholo-
gists 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 informa-
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 147
Dynamic Testing
Robert Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko have proposed the
idea of using testing to assess ability in a dynamic manner.
Sternberg’s concept of developing expertise holds that with
continued experience in a field we are always moving from a
lower state of competence to a higher one. His concept also
holds that standardized tests can’t accurately rate our poten-
tial because what they reveal is limited to a static report of
where we are on the learning continuum at the time the test is
given. In tandem with Sternberg’s three-part model of intelli-
gence, he and Grigorenko have proposed a shift away from
static tests and replacing them with what they call dynamic
testing: 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. Thus, a test may assess a weakness, but
rather than assuming that the weakness indicates a fixed in-
ability, you interpret it as a lack of skill or knowledge that can
be remedied. Dynamic testing has two advantages over stan-
dard testing. It focuses the learner and teacher on areas that
need to be brought up rather than on areas of accomplish-
ment, and the ability to measure a learner’s progress from one
test to the next provides a truer gauge of his or her learning
potential.
Dynamic testing does not assume one must adapt to some
kind of fixed learning limitation but offers an assessment of
where one’s knowledge or performance stands on some dimen-
sion and how one needs to move forward to succeed: what do
I need to learn in order to improve? That is, where aptitude
tests and much of learning styles theory tend to emphasize
our strengths and encourage us to focus on them, dynamic
testing helps us to discover our weaknesses and correct them.
Make It Stick ê 152
Structure Building
There do appear to be cognitive differences in how we learn,
though not the ones recommended by advocates of learning
styles. One of these differences is the idea mentioned earlier
that psychologists call structure building: the act, as we en-
counter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and con-
structing a coherent mental framework out of them. These
frameworks are sometimes called mental models or mental
maps. 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 work-
able model (or overall structure) that can serve as a founda-
tion for further learning.
The theory of structure building bears some resemblance to
a village built of Lego blocks. Suppose you’re taking a survey
course in a new subject. You start with a textbook full of ideas,
and you set out to build a coherent mental model of the knowl-
edge they contain. In our Lego analogy, you start with a box
full of Lego pieces, and you set out to build the town that’s
pictured on the box cover. You dump out the pieces and sort
them into a handful of piles. First you lay out the streets and
sidewalks that define the perimeter of the city and the distinct
places within it. Then you sort the remaining pieces according
to the elements they compose: apartment complex, school, hos-
pital, stadium, mall, fire station. Each of these elements is like a
central idea in the textbook, and each takes more shape and
nuance as added pieces snap into place. Together, these central
ideas form the larger structure of the village.
Now suppose that your brother has used this Lego set be-
fore and dumped some pieces into the box from another set.
Make It Stick ê 154
As you find pieces, some might not fit with your building
blocks, and you can put them aside as extraneous. Or you
may discover that some of the new pieces can be used to form
a substructure of an existing building block, giving it more
depth and definition (porches, patios, and back decks as sub-
structures of apartments; streetlights, hydrants, and boule-
vard trees as substructures of streets). You happily add these
pieces to your village, even though the original designers of
the set had not planned on this sort of thing. 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.
A simpler analogy might be a friend who wants to tell you
a rare story about this four-year-old boy she knows: she men-
tions who the mother is, how they became friends in their
book club, finally mentioning that the mother, by coincidence,
had a large load of manure delivered for her garden on the
morning of the boy’s birthday—the mother’s an incredible
gardener, her eggplants took a ribbon at the county fair and
got her an interview on morning radio, and she gets her ma-
nure from that widowed guy in your church who raises the
Clydesdale horses and whose son is married to—and so on
and so on. Your friend cannot winnow the main ideas from
the blizzard of irrelevant associations, and the story is lost on
the listener. Story, too, is structure.
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 155
The Takeaway
Given what we know about learning differences, what’s the
takeaway?
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 159
162
Increase Your Abilities ê 163
Neuroplasticity
All knowledge and memory are physiological phenomena,
held in our neurons and neural pathways. The idea that the
brain is not hardwired but plastic, mutable, something that
reorganizes itself with each new task, is a recent revelation, and
we are just at the frontiers of understanding what it means and
how it works.
In a helpful review of the neuroscience, John T. Bruer took
on this question as it relates to the initial development and
stabilization of the brain’s circuitry and our ability to bolster
the intellectual ability of our children through early stimula-
tion. 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 micro-
scopic 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 com-
Increase Your Abilities ê 167
Neural cell bodies make up most of the part of our brains that
scientists call the gray matter. What they call the white matter
is made up of the wiring: the axons that connect to dendrites of
other neural cell bodies, and the waxy myelin sheaths in which
Make It Stick ê 170
Is IQ Mutable?
IQ is a product of genes and environment. Compare it to
height: it’s mostly inherited, but over the decades as nutrition
has improved, subsequent generations have grown taller.
Likewise, IQs in every industrialized part of the world have
shown a sustained rise since the start of standardized sam-
pling in 1932, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect after the
political scientist who first brought it to wide attention.11 In
the United States, the average IQ has risen eighteen points
in the last sixty years. For any given age group, an IQ of 100
is the mean score of those taking the IQ tests, so the increase
means that having an IQ of 100 today is the intelligence
equivalent of those with an IQ 60 years ago of 118. It’s the
mean that has risen, and there are several theories why this is
so, the principal one being that schools, culture (e.g., televi-
sion), and nutrition have changed substantially in ways that
affect people’s verbal and math abilities as measured by the
subtests that make up the IQ test.
Richard Nisbett, in his book Intelligence and How to Get
It, discusses the pervasiveness of stimuli in modern society
that didn’t exist years ago, offering as one simple example a
puzzle maze McDonald’s included in its Happy Meals a few
years ago that was more difficult than the mazes included in
an IQ test for gifted children.12 Nisbett also writes about “en-
vironmental multipliers,” suggesting that a tall kid who goes
out for basketball develops a proficiency in the sport that a
shorter kid with the same aptitudes won’t develop, just as a
Make It Stick ê 174
curious kid who goes for learning gets smarter than the
equally bright but incurious kid who doesn’t. The options for
learning have expanded exponentially. It may be a very small
genetic difference that makes one kid more curious than an-
other, but the effect is multiplied in an environment where
curiosity is easily piqued and readily satisfied.
Another environmental factor that shapes IQ is socioeco-
nomic status and the increased stimulation and nurturing that
are more generally available in families who have more re-
sources and education. On average, children from affluent
families test higher for IQ than children from impoverished
families, and children from impoverished families who are
adopted into affluent families score higher on IQ tests than
those who are not, regardless of whether the birth parents were
of high or low socioeconomic status.
The ability to raise IQ is fraught with controversy and the
subject of countless studies reflecting wide disparities of scien-
tific rigor. A comprehensive review published in 2013 of the
extant research into raising intelligence in young children
sheds helpful light on the issue, in part because of the strict
criteria the authors established for determining which studies
would qualify for consideration. The eligible studies had to
draw from a general, nonclinical population; have a random-
ized, experimental design; consist of sustained interventions,
not of one-shot treatments or simply of manipulations during
the testing experience; and use a widely accepted, standard-
ized measure of intelligence. The authors focused on experi-
ments involving children from the prenatal period through age
five, and the studies meeting their requirements involved over
37,000 participants.
What did they find? Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary
supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breast-feeding
women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by any-
Increase Your Abilities ê 175
Brain Training?
What about “brain training” games? We’ve seen a new kind
of business emerge, pitching online games and videos promis-
ing to exercise your brain like a muscle, building your cogni-
tive ability. These products are largely founded on the find-
ings of one Swiss study, reported in 2008, which was very
limited in scope and has not been replicated.14 The study
focused on improving “fluid intelligence”: the facility for ab-
stract reasoning, grasping unfamiliar relationships, and solv-
ing new kinds of problems. Fluid intelligence is one of two
kinds of intelligence that make up IQ. The other is crystallized
intelligence, the storehouse of knowledge we have accumu-
lated through the years. It’s clear that we can increase our crys-
tallized intelligence through effective learning and memory
strategies, but what about our fluid intelligence?
A key determiner of fluid intelligence is the capacity of a
person’s working memory—the number of new ideas and re-
lationships that a person can hold in mind while working
through a problem (especially with some amount of distrac-
tion). The focus of the Swiss study was to give participants
tasks requiring increasingly difficult working memory chal-
lenges, holding two different stimuli in mind for progressively
longer periods of distraction. One stimulus was a sequence of
Increase Your Abilities ê 177
Growth Mindset
Let’s return to the old saw “If you think you can, or you
think you can’t, you’re right.” If turns out there is more truth
here than wit. Attitude counts for a lot. The studies of the
psychologist Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for
showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can
have on learning and performance: the belief that your level
of intellectual ability is not fixed but rests to a large degree in
your own hands.16
Dweck and her colleagues have replicated and expanded
on their results in many studies. In one of the early experi-
ments, she ran a workshop for low-performing seventh grad-
ers at a New York City junior high school, teaching them
about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the
group also received a presentation on memory, but the other
half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a
result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn
something new, the brain forms new connections, and these
new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was
told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding
of intelligence but results from the new connections that are
formed through effort and learning. After the workshop, both
groups of kids filtered back into their classwork. Their teach-
ers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful
learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded,
those students adopted what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,”
a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own
control, and they went on to become much more aggressive
Make It Stick ê 180
Dweck’s work has extended into the realm of praise and the
power it has in shaping the way people respond to challenges.
Here’s an example. A group of fifth grade students are indi-
vidually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve
the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who
solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are
then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar
difficulty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from
by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students
who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90
percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one.
In a twist on this study, students get puzzles from two
people, Tom and Bill. The puzzles Tom gives the students can
be solved with effort, but the ones Bill gives them cannot be
solved. Every student gets puzzles from both Tom and Bill.
After working to solve the puzzles, some of the kids are praised
for being smart, and some for their effort. In a second round,
the kids get more puzzles from both Tom and Bill, and this
time all the puzzles are solvable. Here’s the surprise: of the
Make It Stick ê 182
students who were praised for being smart, few solved the
puzzles they got from Bill, even though they were the same
puzzles these students had solved earlier when they got them
from Tom. For those who saw being considered smart as para-
mount, their failure to solve Bill’s puzzles in the first round in-
stilled a sense of defeat and helplessness.
When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that
being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing
effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck
says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a
child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding
to a failure.”18
Deliberate Practice
When you see stellar performances by an expert in any
field—a pianist, chess player, golfer—perhaps you marvel at
what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert
performance does not usually rise out of some genetic predis-
position or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of
what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If
doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, de-
liberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often
solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond
your current level of performance. Whatever the field, expert
performance is thought to be garnered through the slow acqui-
sition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, pat-
terns that are used to store knowledge about which actions
to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a
champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he
can contemplate many alternative moves and the countless dif-
ferent directions each might precipitate. The striving, failure,
problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize
Make It Stick ê 184
not out of some sixth sense but from an expert’s superior per-
ception and memory within his domain, which are the result
of years of acquired skill and knowledge in that domain.
Most people who achieve expertise in a field are destined to
remain average performers in the other realms of life.
Ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the aver-
age time the people Ericsson studied had invested to become
expert in their fields, and the best among them had spent the
larger percentage of those hours in solitary, deliberate prac-
tice. The central idea here is that expert performance is a
product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of ge-
netic predisposition, and that becoming expert is not beyond
the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation,
time, and discipline to pursue it.
Memory Cues
Mnemonic devices, as we mentioned, are mental tools to help
hold material in memory, cued for ready recall. (Mnemosyne,
one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology, was the goddess
of memory.) Some examples of simple mnemonic devices are
acronyms, like “ROY G BIV” for the colors of the rainbow,
and reverse acronyms, as in “I Value Xylophones Like Cows
Dig Milk” for the ascending value of Roman numerals from
1 to 1000 (e.g., V = 5; D = 500).
A memory palace is a more complex type of mnemonic
device that is useful for organizing and holding larger vol-
umes of material in memory. It’s based on the method of loci,
which goes back to the ancient Greeks and involves associat-
ing mental images with a series of physical locations to help
cue memories. For example, you imagine yourself within a
space that is very familiar to you, like your home, and then
you associate prominent features of the space, like your easy
Make It Stick ê 186
the discussion happened, and you picture the place. Ah, yes, it
all comes flooding back. Images cue memories.21
Mark Twain wrote about his personal experiences with this
phenomenon in an article published by Harper’s. In his days
on the speaking circuit, Twain used a list of partial sentences
to prompt himself through the different phases of his remarks,
but he found the system unsatisfactory—when you glance at
snippets of text, they all look alike. He experimented with al-
ternatives, finally hitting on the idea of outlining his speech in
a series of crude pencil sketches. The sketches did the job. A
haystack with a snake under it told him where to start his
story about his adventures in Nevada’s Carson Valley. An um-
brella tilted against a stiff wind took him to the next part of
his story, the fierce winds that blew down out of the Sierras at
about two o’clock every afternoon. And so on. The power of
these sketches to evoke memory impressed Twain and gave
rise one day to an idea for helping his children, who were still
struggling to learn the kings and queens of England, despite
long hours invested by their nanny in trying to hammer the
names and dates into them through brute repetition. It dawned
on Twain to try visualizing the successive reigns.
We were at the farm then. From the house porch the grounds
sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the
right to the high ground where my small work den stood. A
carriage road wound through the grounds and up the hill. I
staked it out with the English monarchs, beginning with [Wil-
liam] the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and
clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down
to Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign—EIGHT
HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS of English history
under your eye at once! . . .
Make It Stick ê 188
Twain and the children sketched icons for each of the mon-
archs: a whale for William the Conqueror, because both names
begin with W and because “it is the biggest fish that swims, and
William is the most conspicuous figure in English history”; a
hen for Henry I, and so forth.
We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exer-
cise, too. We trotted the course from the Conqueror to the
study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of
reigns as we passed the stakes. . . . The children were encour-
aged to stop locating things as being “over by the arbor,” or “in
the oak [copse],” or “up at the stone steps,” and say instead
that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or
in George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the
long road mapped out with such exactness was a great boon
for me, for I had the habit of leaving books and other articles
lying around everywhere, and had not previously been able to
definitely name the place, and so had often been obliged to go
to fetch them myself, to save time and failure; but now I could
name the reign I left them in, and send the children.22
she faces: Five major topics, times seven essay questions for
each topic, with a dozen succinct, well-argued paragraphs in
each essay to show mastery of the subject. In other words, the
universe of different essays she must master going into exams
is a total of thirty-five—plus a series of short answers to ques-
tions on psychological research methods. Marlys knows which
of the main topics will be the subject of today’s exam, but she
has no idea which essay questions will be assigned, so she’s
had to prepare herself to write on all of them.
Many students who reach this point simply freeze. 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.
Today, the three test topics turn out to be evolutionary ex-
planations of human aggression, the psychological and bio-
logical treatments for schizophrenia, and the success and
failure of dieting. Okay. For aggression, Marlys has got the
she-wolf with her hungry pups at the window of the Krispy
Kreme shop on Castle Street. For schizophrenia, she’s got the
over-caffeinated barista at the Starbucks on High Street. For
dieting, that would be the extremely large and aggressive pot-
ted plant inside the café Pret-a-Manger on Cornmarket Street.
Excellent. She settles in her seat, sure of her knowledge and
her ability to call it up. She tackles the dieting essay first. Pret-
a-Manger is Marlys’s memory palace for the safekeeping of
what she has learned about the success and failure of dieting.
Through a prior visit there, she has become thoroughly famil-
iar with its spaces and furnishings and populated them with
Make It Stick ê 192
392 3 = m, 9 = b, 2 = n embankment
611 6 = sh, 1 = t, 1 = t shootout
333 3 = m, 3 = m, 3 = m Eminem
517 5 = l, 1 = t, 7 = c Lt Columbo
The Takeaway
It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that
effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections
and capability. This single fact—that our intellectual abilities
are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree,
ours to shape—is a resounding answer to the nagging voice
that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort be-
cause the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities.
What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable
of doing. 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.
And it comes down to the simple fact that 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; with these qualities in
healthy measure, if you want to become an expert, you prob-
ably can. And whatever you are striving to master, whether
it’s a poem you wrote for a friend’s birthday, the concept of
classical conditioning in psychology, or the second violin
part in Hayden’s Fifth Symphony, conscious mnemonic de-
vices can help to organize and cue the learning for ready re-
trieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use
form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that char-
acterize expert performance.
8
Make It Stick
200
Make It Stick ê 201
To help you envision how to apply these tips, we tell the sto-
ries of several people who, one way or another, have already
found their way to these strategies and are using them to great
effect.
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 stu-
dents are asked to reflect on what they learned the previous
week and to characterize how their class learning connects to
life outside the class. This is a fine model for students to adopt
for themselves and a more fruitful learning strategy than
spending hours transcribing lecture slides or class notes ver-
batim into a notebook.
tice tests as tests, check your answers, and focus your studying
effort on the areas where you are not up to snuff.
Brief stories follow of two students who have used these strat-
egies to rise to the top of their classes.
I was big into reading, but that’s all I knew how to do for
studying. I would just read the material and I wouldn’t know
what else to do with it. So if I read it and it didn’t stick in
my memory, then I didn’t know what to do about that. What
I learned from reading the research [on learning] is that you
have to do something beyond just passively taking in the
information.
Of course the big thing is to figure out a way to retrieve the
information from memory, because that’s what you’re going
to be asked to do on the test. If you can’t do it while you’re
studying, then you’re not going to be able to do it on the test.
and quiz yourself on it, it just takes a lot longer. If you have a
test coming up in a week and so much to cover, slowing down
makes you pretty nervous.” But the only way he knew of to
cover more material, his established habit of dedicating long
hours to rereading, wasn’t getting the results he needed. As
hard as it was, he made himself stick to retrieval practice long
enough at least to see if it worked. “You just have to trust the
process, and that was really the biggest hurdle for me, was to
get myself to trust it. And it ended up working out really well
for me.”
Really well. By the time he started his second year, Young
had pulled his grades up from the bottom of his class of two
hundred students to join the high performers, and he has re-
mained there ever since.
Retrieval Practice
best to say the line without looking at it. I need to have that
struggle in order to make myself remember it.
“I’ll work like crazy. When I get to where it feels like di-
minishing returns, I’ll quit. Then I’ll come back the next day,
and I won’t remember it. That’s where a lot of my friends will
panic. I just have faith now that it’s in there, it’s going to come
back a little bit better the next time. Then I’ll work on a new
chunk, until I get to the end of the play.”
As he progresses through the script, he’s constantly moving
from familiar pages and scenes into newer material, the play
taking shape like threads added to a growing tapestry, each
scene given meaning by those that came before and extend-
ing the story in turn. When he reaches the end, he practices
in reverse order, moving from the less familiar last scene to
practice the more familiar one that precedes it and then con-
tinuing on through the last scene again. Then he goes to the
part preceding both of those scenes and practices through to
the end. His practice continues reaching back in this way
until he has come to the beginning of the play. This working
backward and forward helps him stitch less familiar mate-
rial to more familiar, deepening his mastery of the role as a
whole.
Learning lines is visual ( just as they are laid out in the
script), but, he says, it’s also “an act of the body, an act of the
muscles, so I’m trying to say the lines in character, get how it
feels.” Fuller examines the language of the script, the tex-
tures of the words, and the figures of speech for how they
reveal meaning. He works to discover the way the character
carries himself, the way he moves across the stage, his facial
expressions—all facets that reveal the underlying emotions that
drive each scene. These forms of elaboration help him develop
an emotional approach to the role and a deeper connection to
the character.
Make It Stick ê 220
Generation
Reflection
Elaboration
When we met the pianist Thelma Hunter, she was learning four
new works for an upcoming concert performance: pieces by
Mozart, Faure, Rachmaninoff, and William Bolcom. Hunter,
who is eighty-eight, won her first prize as a pianist at age five in
New York and has been performing ever since. She is not a
prodigy, she insists, nor even particularly renowned, but she is
accomplished. In addition to a busy life raising six kids with
her husband, Sam, a heart surgeon, Hunter has enjoyed a long
life of learning, teaching, and performing at the piano, and she
is still in the game, sought after and bent to her life’s pleasure at
the keyboard.
Giving new learning multiple layers of meaning has been
central to Hunter’s methods and illustrates the way elaboration
Make It Stick ê 224
for a week, she will sit down and play it through, using a fin-
gering pattern that she had not planned but feels entirely
natural to her and familiar. It’s a paradox, though perhaps not
entirely surprising. She credits her subconscious, drawing
from her long years of playing, with finding a more fluent so-
lution than what she has devised by puzzling it out at the
keyboard. But perhaps it has been the effort at the keys, like
McPhee wrestling his bear, that has set her mind to sorting
through the closets of her memory for something a little more
elegant and natural to fit the occasion.
Students generally are not taught how to study, and when they
are, they often get the wrong advice. As a result, they gravitate
to activities that are far from optimal, like rereading, massed
practice, and cramming.
At the beginning of this chapter we present effective
study strategies. Students will benefit from teachers who
help them understand these strategies and stick with them
long enough to experience their benefits, which may initially
appear doubtful.
Be Transparent
I can’t tell you how many times the students come to me and
they show me their textbook and it’s highlighted in four dif-
ferent colors. I say to them, “I can tell you have done a lot of
work and that you really want to succeed in this class because
you have blue and yellow and orange and green highlighter
on your book.” And then I have to try to tell them that any
more time spent on this after the first time was a waste. They’re,
like, “How is that possible?” I say, “What you have to do is,
you read a little bit and then you have to test yourself,” but they
don’t quite know how to do that.
So I model it in class for them. Every five minutes or so I
throw out a question on the material we just talked about,
and I can see them start to look through their notes. I say,
“Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think
about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and
your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the mem-
ory is over there. The more times you make a path to that
Make It Stick ê 230
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.
finding your own way to the objective,” she said.9 The Medical
College Admission Test, for example, encompasses four major
course blocks: reading, chemistry, physiology, and writing. For
each of these blocks, Hunkler created the learning objectives in
her head that she deemed most important and then set out to
answer them as she studied. “I took a practice test every three
days, saw what I got wrong, and adjusted.” Shooting her azi-
muth. “A lot of students get hung up studying for months, try-
ing to memorize everything, but for me it was more about un-
derstanding the concepts. So my azimuth check would be, Okay,
what is this question asking, what’s the broader theme here, and
does that match up with what I’ve outlined for this section.”
One of this book’s authors (Roediger) attended Riverside
Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, for high school.
Riverside used a form of the Thayer method, with students
having daily quizzes, problem sets, or assignments to be com-
pleted in class. The range of ability of these younger cadets
was much more varied than at the elite US Military Academy
at West Point, but the Thayer method worked well. In fact,
such methods that include daily participation are especially
likely to help students who are not prone to work hard on
their own outside of class. The Thayer method is a strong en-
couragement for them to keep at it, and echoes what Mary
Pat Wenderoth (above) has found in her empirical studies:
that high-structure classes help students who lack a history of
using effective learning techniques and habits to develop them
and succeed in rigorous settings.
midterm exams and a final. The last two exams are cumula-
tive. Having cumulative exams reinforces learning by requir-
ing students to engage in spaced review.
In-Service Training
Maixner told us: “If you hand people the solution, they
don’t need to explore how you got to that solution. If they
generate the solution, then they’re the ones who are traveling
down that road. Should they go left or right? We discuss the
options.”11
Maixner’s years of experience working with clients in
many different fields helps her see around corners, where the
hazards lie. She often uses role-playing to simulate prob-
lems, getting her clients to generate solutions, try them out,
get feedback, and practice what works. In other words, she
introduces the difficulties that make the learning stronger and
more accurately reflect what the client will encounter out in
the marketplace.
Farmers Insurance
Jiffy Lube
There are times when getting learning and teaching right can
shape the trajectory of an entire life. Consider Erik Isaacman,
a thirty-something husband, father of two, and passionate
practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine: acupuncture,
massage, and herbal therapy. We close this chapter with the
story of a turning point in Erik’s fledgling practice, Inner Gate
Acupuncture in Portland, Oregon. It’s the story of a clinic that
was succeeding in its therapeutic mission but struggling as a
business.
Erik and his business partner, Oliver Leonetti, opened In-
ner Gate in 2005, after earning graduate degrees in tradi-
tional Chinese medicine. Through networking and creative
marketing, they began to build a stream of clients. Portland is
fertile territory for alternative therapies. The business grew,
and so did expenses: They leased larger space, hired an assis-
tant to schedule appointments and manage the office, brought
in a third clinician, and hired a back-office employee. “We were
Make It Stick ê 251
SUGGESTED READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Notes
1. Learning Is Misunderstood
257
Notes to Pages 12–20 ê 258
6. The study advice cited from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is dis-
tributed by Newspapers in Education and can be seen online
in “Testing 1, 2, 3! How to Study and Take Tests,” p14, at
http:// nieonline .com /includes /hottopics /Testing %20Testing
%20123.pdf, accessed November 2, 2013.
7. The studies showing the futility of mere repetition in recalling
the details of what a penny looks like or where a fire extin-
guisher is located in a building are in R. S. Nickerson & M. J.
Adams, Long term memory of a common object, Cognitive
Psychology 11 (1979), 287–307, and A. D. Castel, M. Vendetti, &
K. J. Holyoak, Inattentional blindness and the location of fire
extinguishers, Attention, Perception and Performance 74 (2012),
1391–1396.
8. The experiment referred to by Tulving was reported in E. Tulv-
ing, Subjective organization and the effects of repetition in
multi-trial free recall learning, Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior 5 (1966), 193–197.
9. The experiment on how rereading does not produce much
benefit in later retention is from A. A. Callender & M. A. Mc-
Daniel, The limited benefits of rereading educational texts,
Contemporary Educational Psychology 34 (2009), 30–41.
10. The survey showing that students prefer to reread as a study
strategy is from Karpicke et al., Metacognitive strategies. Data
were also taken from J. McCabe, Metacognitive awareness of
learning strategies in undergraduates, Memory & Cognition
39 (2010), 462–476.
11. Illusions of knowing will be a theme throughout this book. A
general reference is Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What
Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
(New York: Free Press, 1991).
12. R. J. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, & L. Zhang, Styles of learning
and thinking matter in instruction and assessment, Perspectives
on Psychological Science 3 (2008), 486–506.
13. The project at Columbia Middle School is reported in M. A.
McDaniel, P. K. Agarwal, B. J. Huelser, K. B. McDermott, &
H. L. Roediger (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle
school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and
placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103, 399–414.
Notes to Pages 20–32 ê 259
2. To Learn, Retrieve
4. Embrace Difficulties
to it’s being learned better and retained longer? The rest of this
chapter explains this puzzle and why it seems to arise.
3. Psychologists distinguish among three stages in the learning
/memory process: Encoding (or acquisition of information);
storage (persistence of information over time); and retrieval
(later use of the information). Any time you successfully re-
membered an event, all three stages were intact. Forgetting (or
the occurrence of false memories—retrieving a wrong “mem-
ory” of some event but believing it to be right) can occur at any
stage.
4. For a classic article on consolidation, see J. L. McGaugh,
Memory—a century of consolidation, Science 287 (2000),
248–251. For a somewhat more recent and lengthy review, see
Y. Dudai, The neurobiology of consolidations, or, how stable
is the engram?, Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004), 51–
86. For evidence that sleep and dreaming helps with memory
consolidation, see E. J. Wamsley, M. Tucker, J. D. Payne, J. A.
Benavides, & R. Stickgold, Dreaming of a learning task is as-
sociated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolida-
tion, Current Biology 20 (2010), 850–855.
5. Endel Tulving emphasized the critical role of retrieval cues in
remembering by stressing that remembering is always a prod-
uct of both the information stored (the memory trace) and the
cues in the environment that might remind you of the infor-
mation. With stronger cues, even weaker traces become acces-
sible for recall. See E. Tulving, Cue dependent forgetting, Ameri-
can Scientist 62 (1974), 74–82.
6. Robert Bjork has emphasized the role of forgetting of an
original event to some degree as aiding the amount of learning
from a second presentation of the same event. The power of
spacing of events on memory (the spacing effect) is one exam-
ple. For examples see N. C. Soderstrom & R. A. Bjork, Learn-
ing versus performance, in D. S. Dunn (ed.), Oxford Bibliog-
raphies in Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, in
press).
7. The problem of old learning interfering with new learning is
called negative transfer in psychology. For evidence on how
forgetting of old information can help in learning of new
Notes to Pages 79–82 ê 268
11. The curse of knowledge, hindsight bias, and other topics are
covered in Jacoby, Bjork, & Kelley, Illusions of comprehen-
sion, competence, and remembering, and in many other places.
A relatively recent review of the effects of fluency can be found
in D. M. Oppenheimer, The secret life of fluency, Trends in
Cognitive Science 12 (2008), 237–241.
12. Social contagion of memory: H. L. Roediger, M. L. Meade, &
E. Bergman, Social contagion of memory, Psychonomic Bulle-
tin & Review 8 (2001), 365–371
13. Two important reviews of the false consensus effect are found in
L. Ross, The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social
perception and attribution processes, Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 13 (1977), 279–301, and G. Marks, N. Miller,
Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: An empirical
and theoretical review, Psychological Bulletin 102 (1987), 72–90.
14. Flashbulb memories of 9/11: J. M. Talarico & D. C. Rubin,
Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories,
Psychological Science 14 (2003), 455–461, and W. Hirst, E. A.
Phelps, R. L. Buckner, A. Cue, D.E. Gabrieli & M.K. Johnson
Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11:
Flashbulb memories, event memories and the factors that in-
fluence their retention, Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General 138 (2009), 161–176.
15. Eric Mazur material comes from his YouTube lecture “Confes-
sions of a converted lecturer,” available at www.youtube.com
/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI, accessed October 23, 2013.
16. The curse of knowledge study about guessing tunes tapped
out is from L. Newton, Overconfidence in the communication
of intent: Heard and unheard melodies (Ph.D. diss., Stanford
University, 1990).
17. The Dunning-Kruger effect originated with Justin Kruger &
David Dunning, Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties
in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-
assessments, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77
(1999), 1121–1134. Many later experimental studies and arti-
cles have been based on this one. See D. Dunning, Self-Insight:
Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (New
York: Psychology Press, 2005).
Notes to Pages 123–131 ê 274
8. Make It Stick
Scholarly Articles
285
Suggested Reading ê 286
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willing-
ham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective
learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and
educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public
Interest 14, 4–58. Describes techniques that research has
shown to work in improving educational practice in both
laboratory and field (educational) settings, as well as other
techniques that do not work. Provides a thorough discussion
of the research literature supporting (or not) each technique.
McDaniel, M. A. (2012). Put the SPRINT in knowledge training:
Training with SPacing, Retrieval, and INTerleaving. In A. F.
Healy & L. E. Bourne Jr. (eds.), Training Cognition: Optimiz-
ing Efficiency, Durability, and Generalizability (pp. 267–286).
New York: Psychology Press. This chapter points out that
many training situations, from business to medicine to continu-
ing education, tend to cram training into an intensive several
day “course.” Evidence that spacing and interleaving would be
more effective for promoting learning and retention is summa-
rized and some ideas are provided for how to incorporate these
techniques into training.
McDaniel, M. A., & Donnelly, C. M. (1996). Learning with analogy
and elaborative interrogation. Journal of Educational Psychol-
ogy 88, 508–519. These experiments illustrate the use of several
elaborative techniques for learning technical material, includ-
ing visual imagery and self-questioning techniques. This article
is more technical than the others in this list.
Richland, L. E., Linn, M. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2007). Instruction. In
F. Durso, R. Nickerson, S. Dumais, S. Lewandowsky, & T. Per-
fect (eds.), Handbook of Applied Cognition (2nd ed., pp. 553–
583). Chichester: Wiley. Provides examples of how desirable
difficulties, including generation, might be implemented in in-
structional settings.
Roediger, H. L., Smith, M. A., & Putnam, A. L. (2011). Ten benefits
of testing and their applications to educational practice. In B.
H. Ross (ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation. San
Diego: Elsevier Academic Press. Provides a summary of the
host of potential benefits of practicing retrieving as a learning
technique.
Suggested Reading ê 287
Books
289
Acknowledgments ê 290
295
Index ê 296
Mental models, 6–7, 83, 101, 52, 80, 81; varied practice
118–120, 257n1; structure of, 46, 51–52, 264n5
building in, 153 Mozart, 184
Mentors, 140 Multiple-choice tests, 41,
Metacognition, 16, 102, 121, 261n12, 262n14
169, 270–271n1 Multiple intelligences, 147–148,
Method of loci, 185–186 275n8
Michelangelo, 184 Musical intelligence, 147
Military jump school training, Myelin, 169, 170–171, 178,
67–78; smoke jump training 280n8
after, 78
Mischel, Walter, 162, 279n1 Narratives, 109–113, 140
Mnemonic devices, 163–164, National Institutes of Health
185–198, 211; in Farmers Human Connectome Project,
Insurance training, 243, 244; 170
historical, 189, 282n23; Naturalistic intelligence, 148
memory palaces as, 185–186, Nervous system: axons and
191–194, 211; mental dendrites in, 166, 169–171,
imagery as, 186–188, 178; brain in (See Brain); in
193–194, 195–196, 211, 224, habit formation, 171–172;
281–282n21; of psychology myelination of, 169, 170–171,
students, 163, 186, 191–194, 178, 280n8; neurogenesis in,
211; rhyme schemes as, 172; synapses in, 166–167,
188–189; songs as, 189; 170
visual imagery as, 187–188, Neurogenesis, 172
193–194, 195–196, 211, Neurons, 166; generation of,
282n22 172; synapses of, 10,
Momentary strength, compared 166–167
to habit strength, 63, 266n12 Neuroplasticity, 66, 142,
Moonwalking with Einstein 164–173, 184, 279n3
(Foer), 195 Neuroscience, 8; plasticity of
Morris, Errol, 109, 126 brain in, 164, 166–173
Motor skills, 40; beanbag study New Yorker, 220
of, 46, 51, 86, 263n1; New York Times, 29, 109, 169
feedback on, 40, 261n12; in Nisbett, Richard, 173, 178,
habit formation, 171–172; 280n12
interleaved practice of, 65, Nutrition, and intelligence
80, 206; massed practice of, quotient, 174–175
Index ê 307