Make it Stick Chapter 5-6

1. Avoid Illusions of Knowing
   • metacognition: monitoring your own thinking
   • we are all hardwired to make errors in judgment
     • we overestimate our competence
     • we are easily misled
   • two systems of knowing
     • automatic and immediate
     • controlled, slower process of conscious analysis
   • memory can be distorted
     • imagination inflation: believes a vivid imaginary event is actually a memory
     • suggestion: the way a question is asked may distort the memory of an event
     • interference from other events
     • curse of knowledge / hindsight bias: our tendency to underestimate how long it will take to learn something that we’ve already mastered
     • accounts that sound familiar can create the feeling of knowing and be mistaken for true
     • fluency illusions: tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content
   • memories are subject to social influence and align with the memories of the people around us
     • social contagion of memory
     • false consensus effect: humans assume that others share their beliefs
   • mental models
   • Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people overestimate their own competence, so they see no need to improve
2. Get Beyond Learning Styles
   • what you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the ways you learn and perform
   • learning styles don’t really exist
     • when the instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better
   • fluid intelligence: ability to think abstractly
   • crystallized intelligence: one’s accumulated knowledge of the world
   • Howard Gardner: there are 8 kinds of intelligence
   • Robert Sternberg: analytical, creative, and practical intelligence

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