Make It Stick

Exploring Nuances

The power of retrieval as a learning tool is known among psychologists as the testing effect.

Instructors should give corrective feedback, and learners should seek it.

Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.

Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more difficult the practice, the greater the benefit.

Dunning and Kruger have also shown that incompetent people can be taught to raise their competence by learning the skills to judge their own performance more accurately, in short, to make their metacognition more accurate.

the premise behind learning styles is that we learn better when the mode of presentation matches the particular style in which an individual is best able to learn. That is the critical claim.

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

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.