People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and or ga nize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental repre sen ta tion of some external reality.1 Think of a baseball batter waiting for a pitch. He has less than an instant to decipher whether it’s a curveball, a changeup, or something else. How does he do it?

There are a few subtle signals that help: the way the pitcher winds up, the way he throws, the spin of the ball’s seams. A great batter winnows out all the extraneous perceptual distractions, seeing only these variations in pitches, and through practice he forms distinct mental models based on a different set of cues for each kind of pitch. He connects these models to what he knows about batting stance, strike zone, and swinging so as to stay on top of the ball. These he connects to mental models of player positions: if he’s got guys on fi rst and second, maybe he’ll sacrifi ce to move the runners ahead. If he’s got men on fi rst and third and there is one out, he’s got to

Learning Is Misunderstood ê 7

keep from hitting into a double play while still hitting to score the runner. His mental models of player positions connect to his models of the opposition (are they playing deep or shal-low?) and to the signals fl ying around from the dugout to the base coaches to him. In a great at- bat, all these pieces come together seamlessly: the batter connects with the ball and drives it through a hole in the outfi eld, buying the time to get on fi rst and advance his men. Because he has culled out all but the most important elements for identifying and responding to each kind of pitch, constructed mental models out of that learning, and connected those models to his mastery of the other essential elements of this complex game, an expert player has a better chance of scoring runs than a less experienced one who cannot make sense of the vast and changeable information he faces every time he steps up to the plate.

Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain— the residue of your experiences is stored. It’s true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control. Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information— the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. The need to understand that when learning is hard, you’re doing important work. To understand that striving and setbacks, as in any action video game or new BMX

bike stunt, are essential if you are to surpass your current level of per for mance toward true expertise. Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

Make It Stick ê 8

Empirical Evidence versus Theory,

Lore, and Intuition

Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on learning theories that have been handed down to us, and these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibil-ity drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches, students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition.

But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what works and to discover the strategies that get results.

Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think. Many others have their hands in the puzzle of learning as well. Developmental and educational psychologists are concerned with theories of human development and how they can be used to shape the tools of education— such as testing regimes, instructional organizers (for example topic outlines and schematic illustrations), and resources for special groups like those in remedial and gifted education. Neuroscientists, using new imaging techniques and other tools, are advancing our understanding of brain mechanisms that underlie learning, but we’re still a very long way from knowing what neuroscience will tell us about how to improve education.

How is one to know whose advice to take on how best to go about learning?

It’s wise to be skeptical. Advice is easy to fi nd, only a few mouse- clicks away. Yet not all advice is grounded in research—

far from it. Nor does all that passes as research meet the standards of science, such as having appropriate control conditions to assure that the results of an investigation are objective

Learning Is Misunderstood ê 9

and generalizable. The best empirical studies are experimental in nature: the researcher develops a hypothesis and then tests it through a set of experiments that must meet rigorous criteria for design and objectivity. In the chapters that follow, we have distilled the fi ndings of a large body of such studies that have stood up under review by the scientifi c community before being published in professional journals. We are collabo-rators in some of these studies, but not the lion’s share. Where we’re offering theory rather than scientifi cally validated results, we say so. To make our points we use, in addition to tested science, anecdotes from people like Matt Brown whose work requires mastery of complex knowledge and skills, stories that illustrate the underlying principles of how we learn and remember. Discussion of the research studies themselves is kept to a minimum, but you will fi nd many of them cited in the notes at the end of the book if you care to dig further.

People Misunderstand Learning

It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teachers and students isn’t serving us well, but some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference. People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—

say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class— you can burn it into memory. Not so. Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

It’s widely believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the most effective way to master a new skill is to give it dogged, single- minded focus, practicing over and over until you’ve got it down. Our faith in this runs deep, because most of us see fast gains during the learning phase of massed practice. What’s

Make It Stick ê 10

apparent from the research is that gains achieved during massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly.

The fi nding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one study strategy of most people—

including more than 80 percent of college students in some surveys—and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning. Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no mea sure of mastery.2

You needn’t look far to fi nd training systems that lean heavily on the conviction that mere exposure leads to learning. Consider Matt Brown, the pi lot. When Matt was ready to advance from piston planes, he had a whole new body of knowledge to master in order to get certifi ed for the business jet he was hired to pi lot. We asked him to describe this pro-cess. His employer sent him to eigh teen days of training, ten hours a day, in what Matt called the “fi re hose” method of instruction. The fi rst seven days straight were spent in the classroom being instructed in all the plane’s systems: electrical, fuel, pneumatics, and so on, how these systems operated and interacted, and all their fail- safe tolerances like pressures, weights, temperatures, and speeds. Matt is required to have at his immediate command about eighty different “memory action items”— actions to take without hesitation or thought in order to stabilize the plane the moment any one of a dozen or so unexpected events occur. It might be a sudden decompres-sion, a thrust reverser coming unlocked in fl ight, an engine failure, an electrical fi re.

Learning Is Misunderstood ê 11

Matt and his fellow pi

lots gazed for hours at mind-

numbing PowerPoint illustrations of their airplane’s principal systems. Then something interesting happened.

“About the middle of day fi ve,” Matt said, “they fl ash a schematic of the fuel system on the screen, with its pressure sensors, shutoff valves, ejector pumps, bypass lines, and on and on, and you’re struggling to stay focused. Then this one instructor asks us, ‘Has anybody here had the fuel fi lter bypass light go on in fl ight?’ This pi lot across the room raises his hand. So the instructor says, ‘Tell us what happened,’ and suddenly you’re thinking, Whoa, what if that was me?

“So, this guy was at 33,000 feet or something and he’s about to lose both engines because he got fuel without antifreeze in it and his fi lters are clogging with ice. You hear that story and, believe me, that schematic comes to life and sticks with you. Jet fuel can commonly have a little water in it, and when it gets cold at high altitude, the water will condense out, and it can freeze and block the line. So whenever you refuel, you make good and sure to look for a sign on the fuel truck saying the fuel has Prist in it, which is an antifreeze. And if you ever see that light go on in fl ight, you’re going to get yourself down to some warmer air in a hurry.”3 Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

Then the nature of Matt’s instruction shifted. The next eleven days were spent in a mix of classroom and fl ight simulator training. Here, Matt described the kind of active engagement that leads to durable learning, as the pi lots had to grapple with their aircraft to demonstrate mastery of standard operating procedures, respond to unexpected situations, and drill on the rhythm and physical memory of the movements that are required in the cockpit for dealing with them.

A fl ight simulator provides retrieval practice, and the practice

Make It Stick ê 12

is spaced, interleaved, and varied and involves as far as possible the same mental pro cesses Matt will invoke when he’s at altitude. In a simulator, the abstract is made concrete and personal. A simulator is also a series of tests, in that it helps Matt and his instructors calibrate their judgment of where he needs to focus to bring up his mastery.

In some places, like Matt Brown’s fl ight simulator, teachers and trainers have found their way to highly effective learning techniques, yet in virtually any fi eld, these techniques tend to be the exception, and “fi re hose” lectures (or their equivalent) are too often the norm.

In fact, what students are advised to do is often plain wrong.

For instance, study tips published on a website at George Mason University include this advice: “The key to learning something well is repetition; the more times you go over the material the better chance you have of storing it permanently.”4

Another, from a Dartmouth College website, suggests: “If you intend to remember something, you probably will.”5 A public ser vice piece that runs occasionally in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offering study advice shows a kid with his nose buried in a book. “Concentrate,” the caption reads. “Focus on one thing and one thing only. Repeat, repeat, repeat! Repeating what you have to remember can help burn it into your memory.”6 Belief in the power of rereading, intentionality, and repetition is pervasive, but the truth is you usually can’t embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over. This tactic might work when looking up a phone number and holding it in your mind while punching it into your phone, but it doesn’t work for durable learning.

A simple example, reproduced on the Internet (search

“penny memory test”), presents a dozen different images of a

Learning Is Misunderstood ê 13

common penny, only one of which is correct. As many times as you’ve seen a penny, you’re hard pressed to say with confi -

dence which one it is. Similarly, a recent study asked faculty and students who worked in the Psychology Building at UCLA to identify the fi re extinguisher closest to their offi ce. Most failed the test. One professor, who had been at UCLA for twenty- fi ve years, left his safety class and decided to look for the fi re extinguisher closest to his offi ce. He discovered that it was actually right next to his offi ce door, just inches from the doorknob he turned every time he went into his offi ce. Thus, in this case, even years of repetitive exposure did not result in his learning where to grab the closest extinguisher if his waste-basket caught fi re.7

Early Evidence

The fallacy in thinking that repetitive exposure builds memory has been well established through a series of investiga-tions going back to the mid- 1960s, when the psychologist Endel Tulving at the University of Toronto began testing people on their ability to remember lists of common En glish nouns. In a fi rst phase of the experiment, the participants simply read a list of paired items six times (for example, a pair on the list might be “chair— 9”); they did not expect a memory test. The fi rst item in each pair was always a noun. After reading the listed pairs six times, participants were then told that they would be getting a list of nouns that they would be asked to remember. For one group of people, the nouns were the same ones they had just read six times in the prior reading phase; for another group, the nouns to be learned were different from those they had previously read. Remarkably, Tulving found that the two groups’ learning of the nouns did not differ— the learning curves were statistically indistinguishable. Intuition

Make It Stick ê 14

would suggest otherwise, but prior exposure did not aid later recall. Mere repetition did not enhance learning. Subsequent studies by many researchers have pressed further into questions of whether repeated exposure or longer periods of holding an idea in mind contribute to later recall, and these studies have confi rmed and elaborated on the fi ndings that repetition by itself does not lead to good long- term memory.8

These results led researchers to investigate the benefi ts of rereading texts. In a 2008 article in Contemporary Educational Psychology, Washington University scientists reported on a series of studies they conducted at their own school and at the University of New Mexico to shed light on rereading as a strategy to improve understanding and memory of prose.