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Make It Stick (1-4)

  1. Learning is Misunderstood
    • learning: acquiring knowledge / skills and having them readily available
      • requires memory
      • need to keep learning and remembering all our lives
      • learning is an acquired skill
    • claims
      • effortful learning sticks
      • we are poor judges of when we’re learning well or not 
      • the most preferred study strategies are the least productive (rereading text, etc)
      • retrieval practice is an effective learning strategy
      • spacing out practice results in longer lasting learning
      • trying to solve something before being taught the solution leads to better learning
    • all new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge
    • elaboration: giving new material meaning by connecting it with what you already know
    • mental model: mental representation of some external reality
      • people who learn to extract key idea from new material and organize them into mental model have an advantage in learning complex mastery
    • cognitive psychology: basic science of understanding how the mind works
      • conducts empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think
  2. To Learn, Retrieve
    • reflection: retrieving knowledge and connecting to new experiences and visualizing / mentally rehearsing
    • retrieving knowledge from memory has the effect of making that knowledge easier to remember in the future
    • massed studying (cramming) leads to higher scores on immediate tests but results in easier forgetting than retrieval
    • when retrieval practice is spaced, it leads to stronger long-term retention
    • corrective feedback is useful for students
      • produces better learning of the correct answers
  3. Mix Up Your Practice
    • practice is more effective when broken up into periods of time and spaced out
      • better mastery, longer retention, more versatility
      • requires more effort
      • allows for consolidation of knowledge
    • interleaved practice - mixing of problem types
    • varied practice - improves ability to transfer learning from one situation to different applications
      • also beneficial for motor learning
    • these skills help develop discrimination skills
      • “What type of problem is this?”
    • these principles are broadly applicable
  4. Embrace Difficulties
    • desirable difficulties: short-term impediments that make for stronger learning
    • how learning works:
    • encoding: converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain
    • consolidation: strengthening mental representations for long-term memory
      • helps organize and solidify learning
    • retrieval: being able to retrieve information when needed 
      • capacity is limited
      • we reassign cues to memories all the time
      • sometimes forgetting is essential to learning 
    • effort helps:
      • reconsolidating memory
      • creating mental models
      • broadening mastery
      • fostering conceptual learning
      • improving versatility
    • generative learning: the process of trying to solve a problem without being taught how
    • impediments you can’t overcome become undesirable difficulties