Make It Stick – Peter C. Brown
We all want to be successful in our lives. Learning is the single most important way to get ahead in life.
Rethinking How We Learn
Most people believe that we learn by rereading passages until we can say them with our eyes closed. Or that we are born with a certain set of skills and must utilize those skills in life, but that is false. With the right practice and tools, anyone can learn anything. Retrieval is the best way of learning. The act of retrieval helps strengthen it.
Learning is really about being able to use knowledge when you need it most.
When you struggle to retrieve information and you find the answer you strengthen your understanding and memory of that point and are able to use it in many situations
Effective Learning Practices and Skills
- Chunking is great for retention
- Stimulate your brain by proper diet and foot and rest
- Choose growth mindset other than fixed mindset
Three things you can do to learn anything faster
- Create self-quizzes to retrieve more often
- Reflect on my asking many questions
- Empty Recall: Create a empty sheet and dump all the information you learned
Spaced practice doesn’t mean doing it over and over again it means doing it now once and let time go by and then do it again
Biggest Myth About Learning
The biggest myth about learning is that learning happens when you consistently do the same action or read the same passage over and over again. Science on the other hand states that learning happens when we try to get new knowledge out of our head
Learning is not as quick as many people believe to learn something new you must go through a series of steps including
- Storing: This is the art of storing information in your short term memory
- Consolidation: learning over a long period of time typically overnight
MIX Up Your Practice
A study was conducted that had two different baseball players practice hitting the ball.
One of them practised the same style over and over and switched every 15 hits
The other players had varied styles over 45 different attempts
The Players who varied there practice did far superior than the ones who didn’t
Embrace Difficulty
Most people believe that when you understand something right away you are learning better that is not the case
Learning is not easy here is why
It requires you to seek ideas, patterns and rules
It requires extensive Cognitive Load
How You Help New Knowledge Go Into Long Term Memory
Do some of your work consciously
Think about how it relates to other things
Wrestle with the idea in your mind
Explain it to someone
Take notes on it or connect it to other maps
Do anything to make that new idea connect with other ideas in your brain
Retrieval Is The Key To Learning
If you want to learn Retrieval is key
The act of retrieving information, especially when it is difficult to do, increases the chance that it sticks in your brain. Retrieval is the most effective way to learn
- Use Quizzes
- Searching for the answer in your brain
- Making mistakes and then correcting them
- When it’s hard to Retrieve information it increases retention