MAKE IT STICK make it stick The Science of Successful Learning Peter C. Brown Henry L. Roediger III Mark A. McDaniel THE BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, Eng land 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Brown, Peter C. Make it stick : the science of successful learning / Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, Mark A. McDaniel. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674-7 2901- 8 1. Learning— Research. 2. Cognition— Research. 3. Study skills. I. Title. LB1060.B768 2014 370.15'23—dc23 2013038420 Memory is the mother of all wisdom. Aeschylus Prometheus Bound Contents Preface ix 1 Learning Is Misunderstood 1 2 To Learn, Retrieve 23 3 Mix Up Your Practice 46 4 Embrace Diffi culties 67 5 Avoid Illusions of Knowing 102 6 Get Beyond Learning Styles 131 7 Increase Your Abilities 162 8 Make It Stick 200 Notes 257 Suggested Reading 285 Ac know ledgm ents 289 Index 295 Preface People generally are going about learn- ing in the wrong ways. Empirical research into how we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how to learn turns out to be largely wasted effort. Even college and medical students—w hose main job is learning— rely on study techniques that are far from optimal. At the same time, this fi eld of research, which goes back 125 years but has been particularly fruitful in recent years, has yielded a body of insights that constitute a growing science of learning: highly effective, evidence-b ased strategies to replace less effective but widely accepted practices that are rooted in theory, lore, and intuition. But there’s a catch: the most effective learning strate- gies are not intuitive. Two of us, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, are cog- nitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study of learning and memory. Peter Brown is a storyteller. We have ix