What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefi ts is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.
And it comes down to the simple fact that the path to complex mastery or expert per for mance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self- discipline, grit, and per sis tence; with these qualities in healthy mea sure, if you want to become an expert, you probably can. And what ever you are striving to master, whether it’s a poem you wrote for a friend’s birthday, the concept of classical conditioning in psychology, or the second violin part in Hayden’s Fifth Symphony, conscious mnemonic devices can help to or ga nize and cue the learning for ready retrieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that characterize expert per for mance.
8
Make It Stick
No matter what you may set your sights on doing or becoming, if you want to be a contender, it’s mastering the ability to learn that will get you in the game and keep you there.
In the preceding chapters, we resisted the temptation to become overtly prescriptive, feeling that if we laid out the big ideas from the empirical research and illustrated them well through examples, you could reach your own conclusions about how best to apply them. But early readers of those chapters urged us to get specifi c with practical advice. So we do that here.
We start with tips for students, thinking in par tic u lar of high school, college, and graduate school students. Then we speak to lifelong learners, to teachers, and fi nally to trainers.
While the fundamental principles are consistent across these groups, the settings, life stages, and learning materials differ.
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To help you envision how to apply these tips, we tell the stories of several people who, one way or another, have already found their way to these strategies and are using them to great effect.
Learning Tips for Students
Remember that the most successful students are those who take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy. You may not have been taught how to do this, but you can do it, and you will likely surprise yourself with the results.
Embrace the fact that signifi cant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat diffi cult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connections, building mental models, increasing your capability. The implication of this is powerful: Your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control. Knowing that this is so makes the diffi culties worth tackling.
Following are three keystone study strategies. Make a habit of them and structure your time so as to pursue them with regularity.
Practice Retrieving New Learning from MemoryWhat does this mean? “Retrieval practice” means self- quizzing.
Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading.
How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How
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would I defi ne them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know?
Many textbooks have study questions at the ends of the chapters, and these are good fodder for self- quizzing. Generating questions for yourself and writing down the answers is also a good way to study.
Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course, both the current week’s work and material covered in prior weeks.
When you quiz yourself, check your answers to make sure that your judgments of what you know and don’t know are accurate.
Use quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your studying to make them strong.
The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefi t of doing so. Making errors will not set you back, so long as you check your answers and correct your mistakes.
What your intuition tells you to do: Most studiers focus on underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides.
They dedicate their time to rereading these, becoming fl uent in the text and terminology, because this feels like learning.
Why retrieval practice is better: After one or two reviews of a text, self- quizzing is far more potent for learning than additional rereading. Why might this be so? This is explained more fully in Chapter 2, but here are some of the high points.
The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.
By contrast, quizzing yourself on the main ideas and the meanings behind the terms helps you to focus on the central
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precepts rather than on peripheral material or on a professor’s turn of phrase. Quizzing provides a reliable mea sure of what you’ve learned and what you haven’t yet mastered. Moreover, quizzing arrests forgetting. Forgetting is human nature, but practice at recalling new learning secures it in memory and helps you recall it in the future.
Periodically practicing new knowledge and skills through self- quizzing strengthens your learning of it and your ability to connect it to prior knowledge.
A habit of regular retrieval practice throughout the duration of a course puts an end to cramming and all- nighters.
You will need little studying at exam time. Reviewing the material the night before is much easier than learning it.
How it feels: Compared to rereading, self- quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels. But what you don’t sense when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it. If you restudy something after failing to recall it, you actually learn it better than if you had not tried to recall it. The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future.
Space Out Your Retrieval Practice
What does this mean? Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.
How to use spaced practice as a study strategy: Establish a schedule of self- quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions. How much time? It depends on the material. If you are learning a set of names and faces, you will need to
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review them within a few minutes of your fi rst encounter, because these associations are forgotten quickly. New material in a text may need to be revisited within a day or so of your fi rst encounter with it. Then, perhaps not again for several days or a week. When you are feeling more sure of your mastery of certain material, quiz yourself on it once a month. Over the course of a semester, as you quiz yourself on new material, also reach back to retrieve prior material and ask yourself how that knowledge relates to what you have subsequently learned.
If you use fl ashcards, don’t stop quizzing yourself on the cards that you answer correctly a couple of times. Continue to shuffl e them into the deck until they’re well mastered. Only then set them aside— but in a pile that you revisit periodically, perhaps monthly. Anything you want to remember must be periodically recalled from memory.
Another way of spacing retrieval practice is to interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it.
What your intuition tells you to do: Intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to single- minded, repetitive practice of something we want to master, the massed “practice-practice- practice” regime we have been led to believe is essential for building mastery of a skill or learning new knowledge.
These intuitions are compelling and hard to distrust for two reasons. First, as we practice a thing over and over we often see our per for mance improving, which serves as a powerful reinforcement of this strategy. Second, we fail to see that the gains made during single- minded repetitive practice come from short- term memory and quickly fade. Our failure to perceive how quickly the gains fade leaves us with the impression that massed practice is productive.
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Moreover, most students, given their misplaced faith in massed practice, put off review until exam time nears, and then they bury themselves in the material, going over and over it, trying to burn it into memory.
Why spaced practice is better: It’s a common but mistaken belief that you can burn something into memory through sheer repetition. Lots of practice works, but only if it’s spaced.
If you use self- quizzing as your primary study strategy and space out your study sessions so that a little forgetting has happened since your last practice, you will have to work harder to reconstruct what you already studied. In effect, you’re “reloading” it from long- term memory. This effort to reconstruct the learning makes the important ideas more salient and mem-orable and connects them more securely to other knowledge and to more recent learning. It’s a powerful learning strategy.
(How and why it works are discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 4.)
