Make it Stick is a book written by novelist Peter C. Brown, Professor of Psychology Henry L. Roediger and Professor of Psychology and Director of the Circle of Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education (CIRCLE) Mark A. McDaniel. These three have combined their knowledge to produce a book that seeks to demystify the art of learning.
Our conventional methods have been passed down the generations and have largely been structured around things that feel familiar and intuitive. The school system throughout the ages has rewarded memorization and regurgitation and the rigid structure has contributed to a mentality of instant gratification. Our personal experiences with 'learning' are actually our experiences with cramming for exams and not actually ' learning'. Doing well in an exam you crammed over creates as the authors call it an "illusion of knowledge"; therefore, practices such as things like massed practice, and repeated reading - which are basically braindead repetitions of singular tasks - have become accepted as 'good ways to learn'... but that's bullshit and we all know it. A week after an exam we start to know fuck all. Why is that?
Real learning is the ability to understand said new knowledge not just throw it up onto a page. We're not used to learning for the sake of learning but rather for the sake of passing an exam, which in turn makes the actual good methods for learning seem counter-intuitive because it doesn't provide the instant gratification that the more mind-numbing methods described previously.
The methods that have great empirical data backing them are as follows:
These strategies are not for the faint of heart. I can tell you anecdotally that it's fucking hard trying to do all this shit and sometimes you feel like you're not making any progress. Mass practice is like crack, and we're all addicted to the crack high already. Trying to add these methods to your learning regime requires struggle because it really makes you think about these concepts actively. You will want to bash your head against the wall at times. But as a wise 900-year-old master once said:
"The greatest teacher failure is" - Yoda
The struggle of doing all these techniques is useful because they all seek to accomplish one goal - the authors call it "the structure". Through the struggle, we learn not just the formulas to concepts but the fundamental principles underlying every concept. Through varied practice, we start to see patterns and concepts being transferred to the other areas; interleaving we come adaptable as we learn to assess different types of situations. Note all these concepts likely will not be the best for passing an exam, if you don't care about retention of information for a bullshit class, massed practice has been shown to provide short-term benefits. But for those concepts and ideas, you really want to know in the long run these strategies will serve you well.
While this is a book for the students of the world, it is also a book for the teachers of the world as they're also eternal students. The authors urge educators to teach their students how learning actually works, to create effective learning environments with desirable difficulty and to be transparent with their students if they do decide to try something different - a simple concept of honesty that has been echoed throughout every book I've read regarding education.
“The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
