Week 5
acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.
Brown, Peter C., et al. Make It Stick : The Science of Successful Learning, Harvard University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usu/detail.action?docID=3301452.
Created from usu on 2021-09-25 19:50:08.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.
Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive.
Flash Cards
Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
Extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems.
In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.
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.
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.
Empirical Evidence versus Theory, Lore, and Intuition
Resources for special groups like those in remedial and gifted education.
People Misunderstand Learning
when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.
Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
Early Evidence
In the other situation, students read the material the first time and then waited some days before they reread it. This group, having done spaced readings of the text, performed better on the test than the group who did not reread the material.
Illusions of Knowing
The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the significance of the precepts they describe, their application, or how they relate to what you already know about the subject.
There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.
Knowledge: Not Sufficient, but Necessary
How to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving.
Testing: Dipstick versus Learning Tool
One of the most striking research findings is the power of active retrieval—testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit.
The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting.
The Takeaway
For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us. A great deal of what we think we know about how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does not hold up under empirical research. Persistent illusions of knowing lead us to labor at unproductive strategies; as recounted in Chapter 3 , this is true even of people who have participated in empirical studies and seen the evidence for themselves, firsthand. Illusions are potent persuaders. 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. Second Lieutenant Kiley Hunkler, a 2013 graduate of West Point and winner of a Rhodes Scholarship, whom we write about in Chapter 8 , uses the phrase “shooting an azimuth” to describe how she takes practice tests to help refocus her studying. In overland navigation, shooting an azimuth means climbing to a height, sighting an object on the horizon in the direction you’re traveling, and adjusting your compass heading to make sure you’re still gaining on your objective as you beat through the forest below.
The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn better and remember longer: 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, and so on. In the chapters that follow we describe these in depth. And because learning is an iterative process that requires that you revisit what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge, we circle through these topics several times along the way. At the end, in Chapter 8 , we pull it all together with specific tips and examples for putting these tools to work.