Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Finally a learning book based on science!

Summary of the key concepts in the book: Conventional Wisdom: Make learning easy Best practice: Design learning with desirable difficulties Discussion: “Learning is deeper and more durable when it is effortful.” “Difficulties that elicit more effort and that slow down learning… will more than compensate for their inconvenience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring. Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties.” “Don’t assume you are doing something wrong if the learning feels hard.” “Not all difficulties in learning are desirable ones. Anxiety while taking a test seems to represent an undesirable difficulty.” Slow down to find meaning. Always read prior to the lecture. “Training has to be engaging in order to hold employees’ attention.” Conventional Wisdom: Concentrate on one topic at a time (aka. massed practice) Best practice: Interleave different but related topics Discussion: “Learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice.” While interleaving can impede performance during initial learning (tests taken immediately after exposure), interleaving has been show to boost “final test performance by a remarkable 215 percent.” In addition, “commonalities… learned through massed practice proved less useful than the differences … learned through interleaving.” “In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete… You need to shuffle your flashcards.” Conventional Wisdom: Reread material multiple times and in close succession Best practice: Space repetition Discussion: “Repetition by itself does not lead to good long-term memory… It makes sense to reread a text once if there’s been a meaningful lapse [at least a day in between] since the first reading.” “The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consol...