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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“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.”

In other words, the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later. It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it. So says physicist and educator Eric Mazur of Harvard. Why? As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory (the curse of knowledge).

Likewise, people who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.

Sternberg’s concept of developing expertise holds that with continued experience in a field we are always moving from a lower state of competence to a higher one. His concept also holds that standardized tests can’t accurately rate our potential because what they reveal is limited to a static report of where we are on the learning continuum at the

It focuses the learner and teacher on areas that need to be brought up rather than on areas of accomplishment, and the ability to measure a learner’s progress from one test to the next provides a truer gauge of his or her learning potential.

If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions. If you are studying biology specimens, Dutch painters, or the principles of macroeconomics, mix up the examples.

Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.