Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

The authors challenge the classic educational system and suggest better evidence-based learning strategies.

Key ideas

Learning should be effortful

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 and massed practice are not efficient

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.

Excerpts

People generally are going about learning in the wrong ways. Empirical research into how we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how to learn turns out to be largely wasted effort. Even college and medical students — whose main job is learning — rely on study techniques that are far from optimal. At the same time, this field of research, which goes back 125 years but has been particularly fruitful in recent years, has yielded a body of insights that constitute a growing science of learning: highly effective, evidence-based strategies to replace less effective but widely accepted practices that are rooted in theory, lore, and intuition. But there’s a catch: the most effective learning strategies are not intuitive.

Most books deal with topics serially—they cover one topic, move on to the next, and so on. We follow this strategy in the sense that each chapter addresses new topics, but we also apply two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better. Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied Thus we unabashedly cover key ideas more than once, repeating them one at a time in sequence. principles in different contexts across the book. The reader will remember them better and use them more effectively as a result.