Make It Stick

328 Pages·2014·0.86 MB·English

by  Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III

MAKE IT STICK

make it stick
The Science of Successful Learning
Peter C. Brown
Henry L. Roediger III
Mark A. McDaniel
THE BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, Eng land
2014
Copyright © 2014 by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III,
Mark A. McDaniel
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Brown, Peter C.
Make it stick : the science of successful learning / Peter C. Brown,
Henry L. Roediger, Mark A. McDaniel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674-7 2901- 8
1. Learning— Research. 2. Cognition— Research. 3. Study skills.
I. Title.
LB1060.B768 2014
370.15'23—dc23
2013038420
Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound

Contents
Preface ix
1 Learning Is Misunderstood 1
2 To Learn, Retrieve 23
3 Mix Up Your Practice 46
4 Embrace Diffi culties 67
5 Avoid Illusions of Knowing 102
6 Get Beyond Learning Styles 131
7 Increase Your Abilities 162
8 Make It Stick 200
Notes 257
Suggested Reading 285
Ac know ledgm ents 289
Index 295

Preface
People generally are going about learn-
ing 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—w hose main job is learning—
rely on study techniques that are far from optimal. At the same
time, this fi eld 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-b ased 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 strate-
gies are not intuitive.
Two of us, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, are cog-
nitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study
of learning and memory. Peter Brown is a storyteller. We have
ix