by What activities lead to learning? Empirical studies seeking answers to this question have shown the most effective ways to make learning durable and versatile are not intuitive. In fact, they often take more effort and feel less productive than conventional methods.
Some teachers and trainers work hard to make new material clear and simple, but when learning is easy, it doesn’t stick. Common student study strategies—rereading, highlighting and underlining—turn out to be largely labor in vain. Single-minded, focused repetition of a new skill? The gains you observe during this kind of massed practice lean on short-term memory and quickly fade.
For students to grow into highly successful learners, they need specific guidance on how learning works. Teachers and trainers would do well to explain what scientists have discovered about learning, and to be transparent about modelling effective strategies in the classroom so that students experience the benefits first-hand. Discussing their experience and results can encourage students to embrace these non-intuitive methods as their go-to strategies.
Below are three potent findings from the research, illuminated more fully in our book Make It Stick.
Retrieval practice. Durable learning is established by working to get new knowledge out of the head, not working to drive it in.
Much of what you take in is fleeting, like a grocery list or phone number—or even the argument in a text you may have read. To make new information stick requires moving it into regions of the brain that hold long-term memory. Scientists call this process consolidation.
Effective study strategies promote consolidation by helping the brain make sense of the new information, fill in gaps, and connect it to what you already know. Unlike short-term memory, durable memory is built by forming a network of physical connections between neurons. The more connections you make to what you already know and can do, the more readily the new knowledge or skill comes to mind again later when you need it.
Attempts to drive learning into the brain—like rereading a text or hitting your 20-foot golf putt over and over again—can create fluency with words on a page or show temporary improvement in the putt, signs often mistaken as evidence of growing mastery, but the learning has not been consolidated and the gains are illusory.
In fact, certain kinds of difficulties during learning foster repeated consolidation, making learning stronger, longer lasting, and more versatile for application in new circumstances. Cognitive scientists call these “desirable difficulties”.
Practice at retrieving learning from memory is paramount. Even something as simple as putting aside a text or article and quizzing yourself on the main ideas, and then going back to see what you missed, has a potent memorial benefit. Frequent low- and no-stakes classroom quizzing and active-learning exercises that require learners to retrieve new material from memory, or to create their own understanding and apply it, help anchor the learning and build the connections that make it memorable and relevant. When quizzes include questions that reach back to earlier material they help students carry that learning forward, connecting it to subsequent learning and a growing mastery of the domain. Active-learning exercises that require recall and application of knowledge from disparate disciplines builds more complex mental models and supports conceptual learning.
Spaced practice. Another desirable difficulty is spacing out your study and retrieval attempts, allowing enough time to pass between attempts so that the memory has grown a little rusty.
When recalling the material takes work, the increased mental effort strengthens connections and retrieval cues, and your future ability to apply what you know and can do.
Anything you want to continue to remember must be recalled periodically from memory. Spacing your practice keeps it strong and accessible, and provides opportunities to interpret material in different contexts, multiplying connections to what you know.
Mixed practice. The typical math book works students through problems one-at-a-time, learning the solution (for example, how to calculate the volume of a wedge in solid geometry) and then practicing many examples of the problem so as to solidify the learning before moving on to practice a different problem (finding the volume of a cone). Likewise, the typical baseball player practices swinging at pitches in the same way, blocked by type: 15 curveballs, for example, then 15 fast balls, then 15 change-ups, and so on.
During practice, a learner typically does very well with this kind of blocked repetition, and the performance improvement is taken as evidence of solid learning. However, mixing up the types of geometry problems or baseball pitches during practice is a far more effective strategy.
Most learners prefer blocked practice because they do well at it. Performance during mixed practice is more ragged, as each new problem must be correctly identified in the moment, then the correct formula to solve it recalled and applied. The student makes more errors and may feel like “I’m not getting it,” but when tested weeks later, the student whose practice problems were mixed will far outperform those whose practice problems were blocked by type.
The same benefits accrue on the athletic field, or in the cockpit or the operating room. Wherever the learner wants to be adept at discerning differences, correctly identifying a challenge, and applying an effective response, spaced and mixed practice will have embedded the knowledge and skills for success.
The writers, based in the U.S., are co-authors of the best-selling book Make it Stick, the Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press). Brown is a novelist and retired management consultant in St. Paul, Minnesota. Roediger and McDaniel are cognitive psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
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