“Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have figured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into.

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.

Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive.

One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.”

Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each chapter to test himself? Could he look at a concept like “conditioned stimulus,” define it, and use it in a paragraph? While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying? Had he at

But every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored.

There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know.

Empirical Evidence versus Theory, Lore, and Intuition

“Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing.