Make It Stick

that cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a…

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Example learners tend to memorize the examples rather than the underlying principles. When they encounter an unfamiliar case, they lack a grasp of…

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Now the students in the bottom quartile who had received the training were much more accurate estimators of the number of questions they got right and of how they performed compared to the other students. Those in the bottom quartile who didn’t receive the training held to their mistaken conviction that they had performed well.

Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.

Every Monday, Wenderoth’s students are required to turn in a single sheet of certain dimensions on which they have illustrated the prior week’s material in drawings annotated with key ideas, arrows, and graphs.

On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the level of language fluency and reading ability will be at or near the top.

Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast.

Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.

shift away from static tests and replacing them with what they call dynamic testing: determining the state of one’s expertise; refocusing learning on areas of low performance; follow-up testing to measure the improvement and to refocus learning so as to keep raising expertise.