Make it Stick

Question 1

What are the Misunderstandings of Learning?

Answer 1

Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary

Question 2

Massed Practice and Rereading

Answer 2

Among the least productive forms of studying.

“Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.

Question 3

Retrieval practice

Answer 3

recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.

A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.”

Question 4

Spaced Practice

Answer 4

When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.”

Question 5

Trying to Solve a Problem Before Being Taught the Solution

Answer 5

leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt. Though it is frustrating, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered. The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation.

In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits. Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still.

Question 6

How to learn underlying principles

Answer 6

When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice.

Question 7

How to Overcome Illusions and errors of competency. ie, how to find out what I actually know.

Answer 7

Testing Helps calibrate our judgements of what we’ve learned.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. ”

Seek Critical Feedback

Question 8

Elaboration

Answer 8

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.”

Question 9

Building Mental Models

Answer 9

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery.

A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.”

Question 10

Connecting New Knowledge to Larger Contexts

Answer 10

the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you.

Likewise, if you’re trying to learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum, it’s easier when you ground it in something concrete that you already know, like the way a figure skater’s rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest.”

Question 11

Growth Vs Fixed Mindset

Answer 11

Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired 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 enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. “when learning is hard, you’re doing important work.

Setbacks and striving are essential if you are to surpass your current level of performance to true expertise.

Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

Question 12

Unity of Knowledge and Creativity

Answer 12

“one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.”
Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill.

These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.

Question 13

How to Learn Better and Remember Longer

Answer 13

various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems

Question 14

Key Tips for Studying

Answer 14

Retrieval Practice

Spaced out Retrieval Practice

Interleaved the Study of Different Problem Types

Elaboration

Generation

Reflection

Calibration

Mnemonic Devices

Question 15

Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention.

Answer 15

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 reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort.”

Question 16

momentary strength vs Underlying Habit Strength

Answer 16

The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts”

Question 17

Cramming

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

How Long to Wait between Study Sessions

Answer 18

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

Question 19

familiarity trap

Answer 19

the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it. This familiarity can hurt you during self-quizzing if you take shortcuts.”

Question 20

How to Structure Interleaving

Answer 20

you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. “it’s more effective to distribute practice across these different skills than polish each one in turn.”

Question 21

Varied Practice

Answer 21

helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit.

Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep, and durable learning, what in motor skills shows up as underlying habit strength.

Question 22

Different between Good and Great Learners

Answer 22

is whether they have cultivated the habit of reflection. Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).”

Question 23

Double use of Testing

Answer 23

“It’s one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery. Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do.

Question 24

How Learning Occurs

Answer 24

Encoding–> Consolidation–> Retrieval

Question 25

Encoding

Answer 25

converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations of the patterns you observed—memory traces.

Question 26

Consolidation

Answer 26

Process of strengthening these mental representations for long term memory. Brain reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces. May occur over several hours and involves deep processing of the new material, during which scientists believe the brain replays and rehearses the learning, giving meaning, filling in blank spots, and making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long term memory. Sleep seems to help consolidation.

Question 27

Retrieval

Answer 27

Durable learning requires we must do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short term to long term memory, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that gets overlooked. Being able to retrieve the memory when we need it is just as important.

Question 28

Breaking Through Limits to Learning

Answer 28

virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning”

Question 29

How to make knowledge durable

Answer 29

if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.

How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth

Question 30

Brain App

Answer 30

With enough effortful practice, a complex set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills fuse into a meaningful whole, forming a mental model somewhat akin to a “brain app”.

Question 31

Expert performance is built through

Answer 31

thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.

Question 32

Building Skills of Discrimination

Answer 32

Spaced and Interleaved Exposure is a good way to learnbecause this type of exposure strengthens the skills of discrimination—the process of noticing particulars (a turtle comes up for air but a fish doesn’t)—and of induction: surmising the general rule (fish can breathe in water).

The difficulty produced by interleaving provides a second type of boost to learning.It’s thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material—a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution.

Question 33

How to Reflect on New Knowledge

Answer 33

What are the key ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? Following an experience where you are practicing new knowledge or skills, you might ask: What went well? What could have gone better? What might I need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might I use the next time to get better results?

Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.

Question 34

Write to Learn

Answer 34

students reflect on a recent class topic in a brief writing assignment, where they may express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other concepts covered in class, or perhaps outside class.

Question 35

A Fear of Failure

Answer 35

can poison learning by creating aversions to the kinds of experimentation and risk taking that characterize striving, or by diminishing performance under pressure, as in a test setting

Question 36

Key to Growth Mindet

Answer 36

intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within my own control,

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.”

Question 37

Edison argued that

Answer 37

perseverance in the face of failure is the key to success. The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches.

Question 38

Failure in and of Itself isn’t precious

Answer 38

it’s the dauntless effort despite the risks, the discovery of what works and what doesn’t that sometimes only failure can reveal. It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon-fed the solution, even if we fall short in our first attempts at an answer.”

Question 39

Important to Improving

Answer 39

s being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don’t know when we’ve got it.

Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.

when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change.

Question 40

Good Judgement

Answer 40

is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance.

Question 41

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve

Answer 41

because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.

Their research showed that incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve.”

Question 42

To become more competent, or even expert

Answer 42

we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

Question 43

The Curse of Knowledge

Answer 43

The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it. So says physicist and educator Eric Mazur of Harvard. Why? As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of “memory

Question 44

How to Offset Illusion and Incompetence

Answer 44

is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.

“When we have reliable reference 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.”

Question 45

Tools and Habits for Calibrating your Judgement

Answer 45

“Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know. Cumulative quizzing is especially powerful for consolidating learning and knitting together concepts from one stage of a course into new material encountered later.

Peer Instruction: working out the problem together, try to reach a consensus on the correct answer.

“Pay attention to the cues you’re using to judge what you have learned. Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not always 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 already know, and enables you to draw inferences. How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension, 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.

Very Useful is Corrective Feedback, and learners should seek this out. Self-Insight leads through other people. In many fields, the practice of peer review serves as an external gauge, providing feedback on one’s performance.

Question 46

Choice when faced with setback

Answer 46

We can steer clear of similar challenges in the future, or we can redouble our efforts to master them, broadening our capacities and expertise.

Show us where we need to do better.

Question 47

Three Steps of Dynamic Testing

Answer 47

Step 1: a test of some kind—perhaps an experience or a paper exam—shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill.

Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques of effective learning.

Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works better now but also, and especially, to where I still need more work.

Question 48

Structure Building

Answer 48

the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing 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.

Question 49

Problem of Low Structure Builders

Answer 49

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 workable model (or overall structure) that can serve as a foundation for further learning.”

Question 50

How to Mimic High Structure Learning

Answer 50

when questions are embedded in texts to help focus readers on the main ideas, the learning performance of low structure-builders improves to a level commensurate with high structure-builders.

Cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a story, strengthens learning. The theory of structure building may provide a clue as to why: that reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and how might I do it differently next time helps me isolate key ideas, organize them into mental models, and apply them again in the future with an eye to improving and building on what I’ve learned.

Question 51

Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes,

Answer 51

s a quest. It is not a grade on a test, something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps into your being with old age and gray hair.

Question 52

Breakdown how to Master

Answer 52

Describe what you want to know, do, or accomplish. Then list the competencies required, what you need to learn, and where you can find the knowledge or skill. Then go get it.

Question 53

The state of Continuing Development

Answer 53

practice dynamic testing as a learning strategy to discover your weaknesses, and focus on improving yourself in those areas.

It’s smart to build on your strengths, but you will become ever more competent and versatile if you also use testing and trial and error to continue to improve in the areas where your knowledge or performance are not pulling their weight.

Question 54

If you are an example Learner

Answer 54

study examples two at a time or more, rather than one by one, asking yourself in what ways they are alike and different. Are the differences such that they require different solutions, or are the similarities such that they respond to a common solution?

Ask what the central ideas are, what the rules are.Describe each idea and recall the related points. Which are the big ideas, and which are supporting concepts or nuances? If you were to test yourself on the main ideas, how would you describe them?
What kind of scaffold or framework can you imagine that holds these central ideas together?

By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.

Question 55

Performance vs Learning Goals

Answer 55

In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills.

People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet.

You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder.

“If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable. “Learning goals trigger entirely different chains of thought and action from performance goals.

Question 56

Deliberate Practice

Answer 56

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 acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations.
The striving, failure, problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize deliberate practice build the new knowledge, physiological adaptations, and complex mental models required to attain ever higher levels

Question 57

Ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the average time the people Ericsson studied had invested to become expert in their fields

Answer 57

the best among them had spent the larger percentage of “best among them had spent the larger percentage of those hours in solitary, deliberate practice. The central idea here is that expert performance is a product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of genetic predisposition, and that becoming expert is not beyond the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation, time, and discipline to pursue it.”

Question 58

Elaboration

Answer 58

e process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.
For instance: Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class. “A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a metaphor or visual image for the new material.

For example, to better grasp the principles of angular momentum in physics, visualize how a figure skater’s rotation speeds up as her arms are drawn into her body. When you study the principles of heat transfer, you may understand conduction better if you imagine warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa.

The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later.”

Question 59

Summary Sheets

Answer 59

Students are asked to illustrate on a single sheet the various biological systems studied during the week and to show graphically and through key words how the systems interrelate with each other.

This is a form of elaboration that adds layers of meaning and promotes the learning of concepts, structures, and interrelationships.”

Question 60

Generation

Answer 60

Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution”

Question 61

Reflection

Answer 61

What is it? Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? “What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?

Question 62

Calibration

Answer 62

Everyone is subject to a host of cognitive illusions, some of which are described in Chapter 5. Mistaking fluency with a text for mastery of the underlying content is just one example. Calibration “is simply the act of using an objective instrument to clear away illusions and adjust your judgment to better reflect reality. The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate.”

Question 63

highlights for Studying:

Answer 63

Always does the reading prior to a lecture
• Anticipates test questions and their answers as he reads
• Answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading
• Reviews study guides, finds terms he can’t recall or doesn’t know, and relearns those terms
• Copies bolded terms and their definitions into a reading notebook, making sure that he understands them
• Takes the practice test that is provided online by his professor; from this he discovers which concepts he doesn’t know and makes a point to learn them
• Reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his design
• Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them above his bed, and tests himself on them from time to time
• Spaces out his review and practice over the duration of the course”