McDonnell Foundation of St. Louis, Missouri, in an effort to better bridge the gap between basic knowledge on learning in cognitive psychology and its application in education, awarded a research grant “Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice” to Roediger and McDaniel and nine others, with Roediger as the principal investigator.
The team collaborated for ten years on research to translate cognitive science into educational science, and in many respects this book is a direct result of that work. The researchers and many of their studies are cited in the book, the notes, and our acknowledgments. Roediger’s and McDaniel’s work is also supported by several other funders, and McDaniel is the co-director of Washington University’s Center for Integrative Research in Learning and Memory.
Most books deal with topics serially— they cover one topic, move on to the next, and so on. We follow this strategy in the sense that each chapter addresses new topics, but we also apply two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.
Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence. Thus we unabashedly cover key ideas more than once, repeating principles in different contexts across the book.
Preface ê xi The reader will remember them better and use them more effectively as a result.
This is a book about what people can do for themselves right now in order to learn better and remember longer. The responsibility for learning rests with every individual. Teachers and coaches, too, can be more effective right now by helping students understand these principles and by designing them into the learning experience. This is not a book about how education policy or the school system ought to be reformed.
Clearly, though, there are policy implications. For example, college professors at the forefront of applying these strategies in the classroom have experimented with their potential for narrowing the achievement gap in the sciences, and the results of those studies are eye opening.
We write for students and teachers, of course, and for all readers for whom effective learning is a high priority: for trainers in business, industry, and the military; for leaders of professional associations offering in- service training to their members; and for coaches. We also write for lifelong learners nearing middle age or older who want to hone their skills so as to stay in the game.
While much remains to be known about learning and its neural underpinnings, a large body of research has yielded principles and practical strategies that can be put to work immediately, at no cost, and to great effect.
M A K E I T S T I C K
1
Learning Is Misunderstood
Early in his career as a pi
lot, Matt
Brown was fl ying a twin- engine Cessna northeast out of Har-lingen, Texas, when he noticed a drop in oil pressure in his right engine. He was alone, fl ying through the night at eleven thousand feet, making a hotshot freight run to a plant in Ken-tucky that had shut down its manufacturing line awaiting product parts for assembly.
He reduced altitude and kept an eye on the oil gauge, hoping to fl y as far as a planned fuel stop in Louisiana, where he could ser vice the plane, but the pressure kept falling. Matt has been messing around with piston engines since he was old enough to hold a wrench, and he knew he had a problem.
He ran a mental checklist, fi guring his options. If he let the oil pressure get too low he risked the engine’s seizing up. How much further could he fl y before shutting it down? What would happen when he did? He’d lose lift on the right side, 1
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but could he stay aloft? He reviewed the tolerances he’d memorized for the Cessna 401. Loaded, the best you could do on one engine was slow your descent. But he had a light load, and he’d burned through most of his fuel. So he shut down the ailing right engine, feathered the prop to reduce drag, increased power on the left, fl ew with opposite rudder, and limped another ten miles toward his intended stop. There, he made his approach in a wide left- hand turn, for the simple but critical reason that without power on his right side it was only from a left- hand turn that he still had the lift needed to level out for a touchdown.
While we don’t need to understand each of the actions Matt took, he certainly needed to, and his ability to work himself out of a jam illustrates what we mean in this book when we talk about learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.
There are some immutable aspects of learning that we can probably all agree on:
First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it.
Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can’t advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies.
Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and diffi cult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we’re still able to adapt. If you’re good at learning, you have an advantage in life.
Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 3
Claims We Make in This Book
You may not agree with the last point, but we hope to persuade you of it. Here, more or less unadorned in list form, are some of the principal claims we make in support of our argument. We set them forth more fully in the chapters that follow.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.
Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.
We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.
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. By massed practice we mean the single- minded, rapid- fi re repetition of something you’re trying to burn into memory, the “practice-practice- practice” of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fl uency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.
Retrieval practice— recalling facts or concepts or events from memory— is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example. Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes. While the brain is not a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger, when the memory is
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retrieved and the learning is practiced. Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.
When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
The pop u lar notion that you learn better when you receive instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research. People do have multiple forms of intelligence to bring to bear on learning, and you learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you fi nd most amenable.
When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations.
This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice. For instance, interleaving practice at computing the volumes of different kinds of geometric solids makes you more skilled at picking the right solution when a later test presents a random solid. Interleaving the identifi cation of bird types or the works of oil paint ers improves your ability both to learn the unifying attributes within a type and to differentiate between types, improving your skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later.
We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment of what we know and can do. Testing helps calibrate
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 5
our judgments of what we’ve learned. A pi lot who is responding to a failure of hydraulic systems in a fl ight simulator discovers quickly whether he’s on top of the corrective procedures or not. In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.
All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
You need to know how to land a twin engine plane on two engines before you can learn to land it on one. To learn trigo-nometry, you need to remember your algebra and geometry. To learn cabinetmaking, you need to have mastered the properties of wood and composite materials, how to join boards, cut rabbets, rout edges, and miter corners.
In a cartoon by the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, a bug-eyed school kid asks his teacher, “Mr. Osborne, can I be excused? My brain is full!” If you’re just engaging in mechanical repetition, it’s true, you quickly hit the limit of what you can keep in mind. However, if you practice elaboration, there’s no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the pro cess of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later. Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air; to know that this is true in your own experience, you can think of the drip of water from the back of an air conditioner or the way a stifl ing summer day turns cooler out the back side of a sudden thunderstorm.
Evaporation has a cooling effect: you know this because a humid day at your uncle’s in Atlanta feels hotter than a dry one at your cousin’s in Phoenix, where your sweat disappears even before your skin feels damp. When you study the
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principles of heat transfer, you understand conduction from warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa; radiation from the way the sun pools in the den on a wintry day; convection from the life- saving blast of A/C as your uncle squires you slowly through his favorite back alley haunts of Atlanta.
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you. Likewise, if you’re trying to learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum, it’s easier when you ground it in something concrete that you already know, like the way a fi gure skater’s rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest.
