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PDF Summary:Make It Stick, by

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Below is a preview of the Shortform book summary of Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel. Read the full comprehensive summary at Shortform.

1-Page PDF Summary of Make It Stick

Although people spend their entire lives learning, most of them are doing it wrong. Strategies like rereading and drilling a skill over and over to commit it to memory take a lot of time and ultimately don’t work.

Make It Stick teaches you the strategies that help you achieve the two primary goals of learning: To understand and remember what you learn so you can use your knowledge in future situations. In this summary, learn how a little forgetting helps you remember, and why you’re not a good judge of how much you know.

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Spaced Practice

As we mentioned, spacing out your retrieval practice creates desirable difficulties that improve your retention. Instead of focusing on one skill or topic at a time—a strategy called massed practice—spaced practice gives your brain the time it needs to strengthen new knowledge and store it in your long-term memory through a process called consolidation.

There are two strategies that naturally space your practice:

1) Interleaved practice mixes your practice among multiple related topics or skills. For example, if you're learning how to calculate volumes of different geometric shapes, mix up the problems—doing a sphere problem, then a cube problem, then another sphere problem—instead of grouping your practice problems by shape. Not only does interleaving space your practice, but it also helps you make mental connections to the other subjects you mix in.

The key to interleaving is to switch to the next skill or concept before you’ve finished practicing one. It feels frustrating to switch gears before you’re ready, but this method improves your long-term retention.

2) Varied practice involves practicing a skill in different contexts. This strategy strengthens your understanding of the underlying principles and your ability to apply that skill in a variety of situations, as in the example of improving your driving skills by practicing in various weather conditions.

Inaccurate Self-Assessment Inhibits Learning

In order to expand your learning, you need to know what you know, what you don’t know, and what you need to work on. But people are poor judges of their own knowledge and abilities, and those miscalculations can inhibit learning.

There are several reasons humans struggle to accurately gauge their own competencies:

  • Perceptual illusions distort your senses and make you misinterpret images, sounds, or other sensations. For example, pilots can encounter optical illusions or, in extreme situations, illusions that make them think the plane is flying level when it’s actually tilted.
  • Cognitive biases are caused by systematic problems with your way of thinking that impact your judgment and decision making. For example, the bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias that makes people more likely to think or do something if other people think or do it.
  • A “hunger for narrative”—the natural desire to create narratives that explain why things are the way they are—leads people to misinterpret situations. Narratives are a stronger influence than objective facts, yet people fail to recognize or vastly underestimate this influence. For example, if your parents made a lot of money from running their own business, you may extoll the concept of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and climbing the socioeconomic ladder, and you may have a hard time understanding anyone’s argument for social welfare programs.
  • Distorted memories lead people to color their memories with false details, and even claim to remember something that never happened. The human memory is inherently moldable, lending itself to distortions and false memories. For example, if a witness to a crime views photos of suspects and then subsequently looks at a lineup, she’s more likely to falsely accuse someone in the lineup if she’s already seen his photo.
  • Misdiagnosing a problem and failing to recognize that it requires a different approach than what your mental model dictates. For example, brain surgeons typically have to perform surgery slowly and steadily, but if certain conditions create pressure in the brain, their patients’ lives depend on them doing the opposite and working as quickly as possible.
  • Oblivious incompetence makes people overestimate their own abilities and underestimate their need to improve.

When these factors impede your ability to accurately gauge your knowledge and ability, you don’t know where your gaps in knowledge are. You’re less likely to spend the extra time practicing the things you need to work on, and when a real-life situation calls for that knowledge, you fall flat.

However, you can improve your gauge of your own competence. Use these learning strategies to help you keep an accurate view:

  • Apprenticeship: Learning alongside a seasoned veteran gives you a clearer view of your skill level compared to an expert’s.
  • Peer Instruction: Collaborative learning with your peers helps you to avoid the kinds of misconceptions you can have when you study by yourself.
  • Peer Review: Your fellow students or professionals can tell if you’re doing a good job or not, and if they give you honest feedback, you can adjust and improve as needed.
  • Team Learning: When you work in a team of people who have complementary skills, each member of the team has an opportunity to learn from the others. Additionally, each person’s strengths are on display, and it’s often apparent if someone is falling short.
  • Real-World Simulations: Training under conditions that resemble what you will face in real-life situations is the best way to hone your skills and see any gaps between conceptual learning and application.

Don’t Let Learning Styles Limit You

Aside from illusions that alter your perception of your knowledge, your learning can also be impeded by myths about your ability to learn. There’s a common belief that everyone has a learning style—such as auditory, kinesthetic, or visual—and that individuals learn best when the style of instruction matches their learning style.

There are two problems with this belief:

  1. While it may be true that people have distinct preferences about the way they learn, research shows that learning isn’t inhibited if the style of teaching doesn’t match the learning style. In fact, everyone learns best when the style of instruction matches the subject of the lesson, such as using visual means to teach geometry, audio to teach foreign language, or kinesthetic to teach physics principles on motion.
  2. A focus on learning styles tends to limit a student’s views of her own abilities and potential. That limitation can affect the student’s confidence to try new things, how much effort she puts forth, and her perseverance in the face of obstacles.

Intelligence Isn’t Fixed

In addition to the myth of learning styles, the myth that intelligence is fixed also impedes people’s learning. When people believe they’re born with a predetermined capacity for learning, they don’t put as much effort into learning. However, intelligence isn’t fixed.

In fact, Americans’ average IQ has risen over time. Several factors affect IQ scores, including a person’s genes, environment, socioeconomic status, and nutrition.

Make the Most of Your Intelligence

You don’t have to raise your IQ score to maximize your intelligence.

Here are three strategies for raising your abilities:

1) Have a growth mindset. People with growth mindsets understand that effort and discipline are critical to learning, so they work harder, take more risks, and view failures as learning opportunities. By contrast, people with fixed mindsets believe intelligence is fixed and that it determines success, so they become helpless in the face of failure because they attribute it to their lack of innate ability.

2) Perform deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is crucial to reaching mastery, and it’s distinct from mere repetition because it’s solitary, it’s goal-oriented, and it consistently pushes you past your current ability. Pushing yourself, failing, troubleshooting, and trying again are necessary to create mental models and achieve mastery.

3) Use memory cues. Memory cues help you organize and retain information using familiar triggers. Memory cues include mnemonic devices like acronyms or more complex tools like memory palaces.

Put These Strategies Into Practice

Now that you understand the principles of effective learning, here are some tips for applying them.

Students and learners, take an active approach to your learning:

  • Pause regularly to ask yourself questions about the key concepts in the material you’re learning.
  • Think of a metaphor or image that demonstrates the principle you’re learning.
  • Try to define concepts before finding the definition, and try to solve math and science problems before learning the formula.
  • As you study, create questions to quiz yourself later.
  • Regularly quiz yourself on new and past material, interleaving multiple subjects. Study the topics of the questions you get wrong.

Teachers, teach your students about the principles and strategies of effective learning—the importance of desirable difficulties, failure, and pushing beyond current ability. Incorporate them into your curriculum by:

  • Using the principles of spacing, interleaving, and variation in your lesson planning.
  • Giving frequent, low-stakes quizzes that incorporate past material.
  • Providing study aids that use retrieval practice, elaboration, and generation—such as practice tests and short-answer exercises.
  • Asking students to spend 10 minutes at the end of class writing about everything they remember from the day’s lessons. After the 10 minutes, they should revisit their notes to find out what they’ve forgotten, and then study that information.
  • Putting students into small groups to collaborate on high-level conceptual questions posed by the teacher, or on concepts they’re struggling with in the material.

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PDF Summary Introduction

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  1. Students don’t learn any better when the lesson matches their preferred learning styles.
  2. Your intelligence is not predetermined.

The strategies you’ll learn include:

  1. Creating Mental Models: Group interrelated concepts or skills into one fluid skillset
  2. Retrieval Practice: Recalling information from memory
  3. Generative Learning: Trying to solve a problem before you’re given the solution, even if you do it wrong
  4. Spaced Practice: Spacing out your study and practice sessions
  5. Interleaving: Mixing your studying among multiple related subjects
  6. Varied Practice: Practicing a skill in different contexts
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PDF Summary 1: What Happens In Your Brain When You Learn

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For example, a Marine learning to parachute in jump school must learn how to hit the ground to minimize injury. First, trainees practice falling from a standing position and get corrective feedback on their positioning. Then, they do the same from two feet off the ground. The Marines apply their knowledge to each progressive level of difficulty as they fall from higher and higher off the ground, incorporating more complicated skills at each level.

Each time you practice, you create a new experience, creating a new cue and further cementing that knowledge in your memory. Retrieval cues help you pull up the information in different situations, making the difference between retaining static facts and being able to use the knowledge when a situation calls for it. The more retrieval cues you have, the more readily you can recall information.

Additionally, when you retrieve knowledge from your memory, you trigger reconsolidation, which further bolsters the memory traces and allows you to form even more connections with information you’ve learned since the knowledge was first consolidated.

Your Brain Is Built for Learning

Learning is a lifelong process. Your brain is...

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PDF Summary 2: Improve Comprehension: Identify Underlying Principles

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  1. An army attacking a castle must cross a moat, but the bridges are designed to explode if too many people cross at once.
  2. An inoperable tumor must be treated with radiation, but the amounts of radiation that are small enough to avoid damaging the surrounding healthy tissue aren’t enough to destroy the tumor.

The students struggle to find a solution to either question in isolation, until they look at both and try to discern the commonalities between them. In both problems:

  1. Something relatively large needs to reach a target
  2. Sending the full force all at once will cause disaster
  3. Smaller portions of the force avoid disaster, but they don’t deliver enough power to solve the problem

When students extract these similarities, they’re more likely to reach a solution in which they direct smaller forces at the target through different passages—multiple bridges or different angles of radiation—at the same time. Additionally, once students identify the underlying principles of the solution, they’re able to apply it to all different kinds of problems.

Step 2: Structure Building

**After you’ve identified the rules, connect those principles with prior...

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PDF Summary 3: Improve Retention: Retrieval Practice

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1) They take a lot of time. The time you spend rereading would be better spent using other, more effective strategies, which we’ll get into later.

2) They don't help you remember the information long term. You may remember the material long enough to pass a test the following day, but you’ll forget most of it by the time the midterm rolls around. In fact, research proves that retention quickly fades with these methods.

In a pair of identical experiments conducted at two different universities, one group of participants read the material once, and another group read it twice in one sitting. When both groups were tested right after reading, the group that read the material twice did slightly better. However, when the groups were tested later, there was no difference—the benefit of rereading was only temporary.

3) They fool you into thinking you’ve mastered the material. Rereading in succession makes you more familiar with the specific text and its wording, which tricks you into thinking you’ve mastered the concepts behind the text. **Mastery requires you to know the information, grasp the underlying ideas and concepts, and understand how to apply them to...

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PDF Summary 4: Spaced Practice: Benefits and Methods

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  1. Changing your focus among related topics helps you make connections among them, which deepens your understanding of each subject.

The key to interleaving is to switch to the next skill or concept before you’ve finished practicing one. It feels counterintuitive and frustrating to switch gears before you’re ready, which is why teachers and students often resist interleaving.

In fact, in contrast to the momentary strength you get from massed practice, interleaving actually hinders your performance while you’re learning the material. However, in the long term, this method still results in better retention.

In one study, college students learned how to calculate the volumes of four geometric shapes. One group of students solved practice problems that were grouped by the shape, while the other group of students solved an interleaved set of practice problems. That day, students doing massed practice performed better, averaging 89% correct answers, compared to 60% among students who did interleaved practice. However, on a test the following week, the students who’d done interleaved practice averaged 63% correct, whereas the other group dropped to 20%.

(Shortform note:...

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PDF Summary 5: Desirable Difficulties Enhance Learning

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Most classrooms still don’t embrace errors. As a result, many students develop a fear of failure that impedes their learning in two ways: First, their fear inhibits them from trying challenging lessons.

Second, fear of failure produces anxiety in high-pressure situations, such as tests. Anxiety taxes your working memory, which is your capacity to keep information in your head while solving a problem. When performance anxiety strains your working memory, you have less mental bandwidth to actually figure out the problem in front of you.

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PDF Summary 6: Illusions and Myths that Impede Your Learning

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  1. Perceptual illusions: Perceptual illusions distort your senses and make you misinterpret images, sounds, or other sensations. For example, pilots can encounter optical illusions or, in extreme situations, illusions that make them think the plane is flying level when it’s actually tilted.
  2. Cognitive biases: Cognitive biases are caused by systematic problems with your way of thinking that impact your judgment and decision making. For example, the bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias that makes people more likely to think or do something if other people think or do it.

Hunger for Narrative

Paradoxically, people sometimes unwittingly create their own illusions in an attempt to make sense of the world. People naturally want to find order and reason, so they unconsciously create narratives that explain why something is the way it is.

People also create narratives that explain events in their own lives, including circumstances they’ve faced and actions they’ve taken. For example, someone may say that no one in her family has attended college because they’re not “academic” types, which reflects the narrative she and her family have created.

**Narratives...

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PDF Summary 7: How Do You Measure Intelligence?

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  1. Practical: Adapting and applying new ideas and solutions in the varied contexts of daily life (street smarts)

In contrast to other theories, Sternberg’s model is supported by empirical research.

Sternberg did a study of children in Kenya that tested their practical knowledge of herbal medicines, which would help them in daily life, as well as their analytical knowledge, which helps them in school. Children who knew more about herbal medicines tended to perform worse at school, and vice versa. Sternberg reached the conclusion that the difference depended upon whether a child’s family valued and emphasized practical knowledge or academic (analytical) knowledge.

Sternberg’s study produced two important takeaways about traditional intelligence tests:

  1. They don’t factor in differences in environment. A student’s lack of exposure or support in a certain area of information doesn’t reflect a lack of ability.
  2. They measure what people know at the time they take the test. People learn continually throughout their lives, and intelligence tests indicate nothing about test-takers’ ability or potential to learn more.

Sternberg’s Dynamic Testing

In...

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PDF Summary 8: Make the Most of Your Intelligence

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Strategy #2: Deliberate Practice

Mastery requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is more than mere repetition—it has several distinct characteristics, including:

  • Being solitary
  • Being goal-oriented
  • Pushing past current ability

(Shortform note: Read more about the power of deliberate practice in our summary of Peak.)

Pushing yourself, failing, troubleshooting, and trying again are necessary for building the skills and creating the mental models that lead to mastery. Through deliberate practice, you gradually develop a repertoire of increasingly high-level skills that you can then apply in a wide variety of situations.

Although deliberate practice is generally most effective when it’s solitary, coaches and trainers can play pivotal roles in helping you to see your areas of weakness, providing corrective feedback, and pushing you to redouble your efforts on the areas where you’re struggling most.

Strategy #3: Memory Cues

Memory cues are tools for shorthanding information that you need to remember. **Memory cues can help you remember facts on a surface level, but...

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PDF Summary 9: Put These Strategies Into Practice

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Teachers play an important role in teaching their students how to learn and designing instruction that incorporates effective learning and studying strategies.

First, help your students understand the principles of effective learning, including:

  • Desirable difficulties are important for deep understanding and long-term retention
  • The only way to achieve mastery is to consistently reach beyond your current ability level
  • Failures are not only inevitable but also provide invaluable learning opportunities

Second, incorporate desirable difficulties in your teaching by:

  • Using the principles of spacing, interleaving, and variation in the way you present information
  • Giving frequent, low-stakes quizzes and being transparent about the quiz schedule. Students generally react and perform better when they know when to expect quizzes, and the anticipation doesn’t reduce the quizzes’ effectiveness.
  • Incorporating past lessons and material in quizzes and exercises
  • Providing study aids that use retrieval practice, elaboration, and generation—such as practice tests, reflection writing exercises, short answer retrieval exercises, and problems assigned...
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