Make It Stick-The Science of Successful Learning
By Peter C. Brown. Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel
A friend recommended that I dive into this book since I was
hoping to learn about the latest theories on learning and cognition; one reason
for my search is to be a better coach with volleyball athletes, but as it turns
out, this book is helping me become a better college professor.
The authors devoted the opening chapter to the myths and sacred
cows that we carry in our minds about how we learn and how to best create an
environment that is suited for teaching. They recount the large number of beliefs that
many hold dear as the absolutely truth and then give evidence which debunks
them one by one.
The central tenet for the book is stated clearly very early in
the first chapter: learning needs memory
and the ability to recall from the memory; people will need to continue to learn
and remember throughout our lives in order to function; and finally learning is
an acquired skill, not a natural skill, one that need to be practiced.
Very early on in this book, the authors laid out their own
beliefs. The first is that learning needs to be effortful in order to be
effective, that is, we learn better when learning is difficult. They also believe
that people tend to be poor judges when it comes to determining how well we
learn a subject; we often overestimate our learning prowess. One of their
biggest pet myths is that rereading and massed practices - the perennially preferred
studying practice of most people - is the worst and least effective practice habit.
What do they believe in? They believe that learning comes
from our ability to retrieve knowledge from our memory, and that we need to
exercise that memory retrieval constantly in order to makes sure that it is
always there for our recall. They believe that the exercise of retrieval and
recall needs to be done with built in gaps in timing, i.e. they need to be
spaced; they believe in making the repetitions be unpredictable and irregularly
spaced in time, i.e. interleaved. They
believe that before being shown how to resolve a problem, the learner needs to
wade into the problem without any clue as to how to solve the problem. They
believe that searching for and discovering the underlying reasons for a piece
of knowledge is much more important that just being able to perform a skill
repetitively, although they do acknowledge the importance of being able to repeat
a task procedurally.
Although the ideas and methods that is covered in this book
is not all completely new to me, the presentation and organization is quite
interesting. They can cite a great number of studies in the scientific
literature that effectively and sufficiently support their arguments against
the stated myths while citing enough studies which also amply support their
arguments. The most interesting part of the book came to me after I had read it
from cover to cover and was sitting down to review what I had learned. What the
authors cleverly did is to use the very desired practices that they are
espousing in structuring the book. They spaced the same descriptions of the
desired practice repeatedly through the text, they interleaved certain
arguments in all the chapters, they gave the reader time and room to discern
the underlying principles, and they motivated the reader to elaborate on what
they had learned to themselves, at least I did.
I am relatively certain that this was deliberate. Indeed, I followed the rut that they had
called out in their recitation of bad learning habits and strategies as I was
reading, rereading, and taking massive amounts of notes in order forcefully
lever the ideas into my head. Little did I know that the authors had, by the
nature of how the book is structured, created an opportunity for the reader to
practice what they had preached.
As I stepped through my memories of the time that I was
reading this book, along with a couple of other books on how to best learn, I unintentionally
spaced and interleaved my learning from this book because I was switching
between books, a practice that I had picked up as a matter of habit as my
learning habit throughout my life. The real question is then whether this tactic
was successful: did it accomplish the goals in the way that the authors had
intended? I can’t speak for the longevity memory retention of the lesson from
the book, but I can say that I did spend a lot of time thinking and
understanding the underlying principles. I will be able to speak to the
longevity of my learning with their preferred methods when someone asks me
about the book in a few years, but as of now, I had worked long and hard on
learning from this book.
