Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel - Key Points

Make it Stick is a book about effective learning strategies, It is based on the latest findings of various research studies into how Cognitive Psychology can best be applied to Education and is written by experts in this field.

The central thesis of this book is that the most effective learning strategies are simple but often counter-intuitive. The key points can be summarised as follows:

1. Learning requires effort: some kinds of difficulties ("desirable difficulties") during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered;  When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten. Don't confuse fluency/familiarity with learning
2. Learning is better when you wrestle with new problems before being given the solution, rather than the other way round.
3. Retrival practice (= self-quizzing) - recalling facts or concepts or events from memory - makes learning stick. This can be best done by regular testing as part of the learning process either in class or individually. Thus testing is formative - a means to the end - which is learning. 
4. Practice that is spaced out, interleaved with other learning and varied produces better mastery, longer retention and greater versatility. Cramming and chunking are NOT effective learning methods.
5. Mastery moves from knowledge to know-how. When learning, distill the underlying principles, look for patterns, make connections. "Knowledge is not know-how until you understanding the underlying principles at work and can fit them together into a structure larger than the sum of the parts." (p.158)

Interestingly, the authors criticise pandering to individual learning styles:

"We acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fits those preferences." (p.132)

Departing from the main theme of the book, there is an interesting chapter (7) on how to 'Increase your Abilities', which explains neuroplasticity and how IQ can be improved, before launching into a number of memory techniques.

The final chapter (8) distills out the book's principles with tip for different user groups: students, life-longer learners, teachers and trainers.

Make it Stick is an important book for students (of all ages) and teachers alike (particularly in the secondary and tertiary age phases). It challenges many traditional methods of learning and does so with a weight of research behind it. Schools would do well to take on board its central points. Teachers might like to review their schemes of work considering how they will incorporate more testing, spaced interleaved and varied learning into their programmes.
For more information go to makeitstick.net, where there is an chapter by chapter summary of the book.

I must say that I found the book's (somewhat apologetic/defensive) tone and style intensely irritating throughout. It was a dry read and it was repetitive - I can only think that the authors decided to model the concept of "desirable difficulty" and "spaced learning"! 

Failure . . . a key educational experience

As a teenager one of my favourite reads was Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures, which distilled failure into humour and thus made it fit for human consumption. Failure may be funny when served with a side order of schadenfreude, but in the real world, it really isn't all that popular at all.

Perhaps it has always been this way, perhaps I'm just noticing it more, or perhaps it's a product of the easy A-grade culture, but I am increasingly conscious that parents don't like their children failing. And I'm not talking here about the fundamentals - no one wants their child to fail their A-levels or to fail to get the grades for a chosen university course - but parents increasingly intervene when there is a slightest blip from the flawless path of success. Here in the independent sector, there is a growing constituency who believe, just because they are paying fees, that they are buying success. We are in danger of falling into the trap of creating a false universe where the only thing that matters is success. (And we in schools are just as guilty -  we celebrate success in every assembly, on every website post and in every Speech Day address.  When did we last celebrate a failure?)

As parents and educators we want our children to grow and thrive. We want them to have a range of experiences that develop them as into mature, thoughtful, productive, independent adults. We naturally want to protect our children. But protecting children from harm is one thing, protecting them from failure is quite a different matter.

Real life - especially very successful life - is made up of both success and failure. In "bigging up" our children, we are neglecting to see the value of failure as an educational experience. If we are to equip young people for the real world beyond the security of our homes and schools, we need to give them the strength and resilience to cope with failure. Failure is only a bad thing if we let it defeat us. It is how we respond to failure that matters most - indeed, it is what my parents' generation would call "character-building" (a phrase we rarely hear anymore - why?). 

One of the consequences of the "succeed, but don't fail" culture is that young people become risk averse. The much-quoted research of Carol Dweck at Stamford University has demonstrated that the young people who have a "fixed mindset" are less likely to cope with failure and more likely to take risks academically, than those who have a "growth mindset" (See Carol Dweck's Mindset). What is clear from Dweck's research is that we need to encourage young people to take risks, to allow them to fail, and to teach them to learn from their failures - thus developing resilience. (There are excellent summaries of Dweck's research in both Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Matthew Syed's Bounce).

The last word here must go to Michael Jordan in his iconic Nike Advert (which makes a great school assembly!).  

"I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life . . . . . . . and that is why I succeed."

Further Reading:

• Malcolm Gladwell 'The Talent Myth' New Yorker 22/07/2002
• Malcolm Gladwell Outliers: The Story of Success
• Carol Dweck Mindset
• Matthew Syed Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

What do you really think?

Consider the following puzzle:

A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The father is killed and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps, "This child is my son!"

Who is the doctor?

This is an insight puzzle. If you found it difficult or impossible to solve, that is because you were blinded by an assumption. In this case it is likely that you have assumed that all doctors are men. Once you are liberated from the implicit association between doctors and men, then it is a very quick step to concluding that the doctor is the boy's mother.



If you would like to explore what implicit association you are unconciously making on a range of issues, then go to Harvard University's Project Implicit website. You can take an online Implicit Association Test [IAT]. Each tests takes about ten minutes to do and you get immediate feedback. There are a range of IATs on the following topics:

• Gender - Career
• Gender - Science
• Race ('Black - White' IAT)
• Weapons ('Weapons - Harmless Objects' IAT)
• Weight ('Fat - Thin' IAT)
• Skin-tone ('Light Skin - Dark Skin' IAT)
• Age ('Young - Old' IAT)
• Sexuality ('Gay - Straight' IAT)
• Arab-Muslim ('Arab Muslim - Other People' IAT)
• Religion ('Religions' IAT)
• Disability ('Disabled - Abled' IAT)

Click here to go to the IAT website

Further Reading
Malcolm Gladwell Blink pp. 77-88