#385： Learning How to Learn
Episode Stats
Summary
When you study for a test or learn a new skill, you might repeat facts over and over again until you can do it in your sleep. While these brute force tactics might make you feel like you re encoding new information in your brain, my guest today argues that you re just fooling yourself.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when you study
00:00:18.700
for a test or you're trying to learn a new skill what's your typical approach if you're like most
00:00:22.720
people you might repeat facts over and over again or do the same task over and over and over again
00:00:27.340
until you can do it in your sleep while these brute force tactics might make you feel like
00:00:30.960
you're encoding new information in your brain my guest today argues that you're just fooling
00:00:34.420
yourself his name is peter brown and he's the co-author of the book make it stick the science
00:00:38.500
of successful learning today on the show peter and i discuss why typical approaches to studying
00:00:42.540
might make it feel like you're learning but don't actually work we then delve into research back
00:00:46.920
advice and how to really learn something and really retain it some of these insights are going to seem
00:00:50.980
pretty counterintuitive if you're a student someone who's looking to become more proficient in new
00:00:54.600
skill or just dedicated to the idea of lifelong learning this episode is packed with actual
00:00:59.260
advice you don't want to miss it after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is
00:01:03.360
slash make it stick where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:01:10.080
peter brown welcome to the show thank you brett i'm a fan of the art of manliness delighted to be here
00:01:27.500
well you wrote a book a co-authored a book called make it stick the science of successful learning
00:01:33.600
it's a book about how to learn which is i mean i thought everyone just sort of picked up how to learn
00:01:38.780
you know just naturally we learn how to walk without anyone telling us how to learn
00:01:42.680
we learn how to spell and write so what do most people get wrong about learning that necessitated
00:01:49.820
writing an entire book about how to do it right well just let me start by saying that the book is a
00:01:56.580
culmination of a decade of research that by 11 cognitive psychologists at different universities
00:02:02.460
across the country funded by the department of education and a private foundation trying to
00:02:07.700
understand what leads to better retention of the of the new learning and what the cognitive
00:02:13.800
psychologists discovered one of whom was my brother-in-law which is how i got involved in
00:02:18.320
writing this book i'm not a psychologist i'm a retired management consultant and a writer
00:02:22.920
but what they found was counterintuitive that what we are drawn to the kinds of strategies we're drawn to
00:02:29.360
are very low yield strategies they're things like well focusing on trying to get new learning
00:02:35.640
into the brain by reading and rereading or standing in front of your golf ball trying to master your
00:02:44.320
20-foot putt by doing it over and over and over again in a masked fashion those kinds of strategies
00:02:51.200
intuitively feel productive because you become fluent in the text of something you've read many times
00:02:58.700
or you see actual gains in your 20-foot putt after 10 or 15 attempts but what you don't understand
00:03:07.080
is that the fluency a the read the material won't stick just by rereading it b you can't really describe
00:03:17.100
the underlying concepts just by rereading something and in the case of a motor skill like your 20-foot putt
00:03:24.940
the improvements that you've seen in that kind of practice are leaning on short-term memory that
00:03:30.920
stuff hasn't gone into long-term memory and that's a real a problem that we're not somehow wired to be
00:03:39.280
aware of as learners yeah i mean i when i read that like sort of the typical things we fall back to like
00:03:44.740
i did that all through high school all through college you you you highlight things that you read
00:03:49.200
you take notes and you just kind of like repeat the notes to yourself over and over and over again
00:03:54.260
before an exam and that's what i did right and and it we find this you know uh university students do
00:04:05.000
that uh they spend all-nighters and in fact you if you do that kind of cramming and walk into an exam
00:04:12.860
the next morning you can do well on the exam but in the studies you look at that person being tested
00:04:19.760
on the same material a week later and more than half of it has already leaked away it's it's it's
00:04:25.540
fallen off we're we're wired to forget we've known that for many years and the issue is how do you how do
00:04:33.420
you interrupt that forgetting how do you lock that learning in but the fact that you can cram and do well
00:04:40.160
on an exam and get the grade creates this illusion that you're on top of the material and on you march
00:04:46.540
through your courses and it is counterproductive it's productive in the sense of getting you a
00:04:51.180
grade but if you're really intent on learning something and have and hanging on to it and
00:04:55.360
building mastery it's not productive so we'll talk about some of these skills that we can do or what
00:05:00.500
what the strategy we need to take in order to actually gain mastery but we this illusion of
00:05:06.500
knowledge that happens when we cram or what's called mass mass studying is one illusion that
00:05:12.460
that keeps us from learning actually learning the material but you also highlight other illusions of
00:05:17.920
knowledge that prevent us from actually gaining knowledge of you know we fool ourselves in thinking
00:05:24.220
that we know but we really don't what are some of those other illusions of knowledge well uh in
00:05:30.740
an instructional setting there's this sort of temptation to try to make the material easy make
00:05:36.340
it as clear as you can and as easy as you can for the learner a learner then gets this instructional
00:05:44.900
lecture or a video it's so clear you kind of have the sense yeah i think i already knew that
00:05:50.820
um and so you walk out feeling confident that you're on top of that particular material well what's
00:05:58.380
happened is the brain hasn't wrestled with it at all you have an illusion of knowing it but it leaves
00:06:04.340
quickly you but you could have that experience in the morning reading the uh the news blogs reading an
00:06:10.200
article that you want to mention to a friend over lunch and thinking boy this is really compelling you
00:06:14.600
get to lunch you say did you see that article like i said no what did you like about it can't quite
00:06:19.260
remember it it's kind of gone it didn't think it would be gone but it is so you have this illusion uh if
00:06:26.520
it's easy if it looks easy seems easy feels easy you think it'll stick it won't another uh misconception
00:06:34.240
is that if you uh are intentional if you intend to remember something you will you say to yourself
00:06:43.640
boy this is something i really want later i'm locking it i'm thinking about it i'm going to have that
00:06:48.620
later that intentionality also does not help make learning stick yeah and one of the other illusions
00:06:55.480
that i thought was funny because it reminded me of socrates so there's one of the dialogues where
00:07:01.120
socrates wants to prove that you know we have we know everything because we existed you know before
00:07:07.640
we came to earth and we just have to retrieve this knowledge right it's already there in our brain and
00:07:12.020
he like he show he shows this or proves this supposedly by asking this slave child you know to prove like
00:07:18.440
to some sort of geometric proof but like the way socrates does it he just asks him a series of leading
00:07:23.160
questions that if you just answer the questions right you know because you know what the answer
00:07:27.800
is because the questions actually the questioners socrates is telling you what what he wants you'll
00:07:31.960
get that we get it right and like that was one of the other illusions suggestion right the way
00:07:36.240
teachers ask questions makes us think we we actually know this stuff yes although on the other hand that
00:07:44.020
instructional strategy can be quite powerful because we know that all new learning
00:07:50.580
has to connect to something we already know or you you can't learn it so if you start say in the
00:07:58.580
socratic process of asking a student or a learner a question you start with what they know and then
00:08:05.560
you ask them another question that's adjacent to that in terms of the level of knowledge you can pull
00:08:12.680
people through figuring out the material wrestling with it trying different things if they make a mistake
00:08:18.940
give them some corrective feedback becomes a very effective way to learn because you are deeply
00:08:24.960
engaged in the puzzle solving the puzzle if you will your your brain is working on it which is
00:08:31.480
essential for making learning stick for connecting it to the other things you know and having ways to
00:08:38.560
retrieve it again later another thing that gets in our way sort of hardwired for this is the dunning-kroger
00:08:45.740
effect what is that how does that get in the way of our learning well uh david dunning and justin
00:08:53.420
kruger are psychologists who i think the late 90s they were at cornell university and they did a study
00:09:02.960
and they found that some people low-performing people will be given problems in a group where a group of
00:09:13.300
people are solving the same problem and the low performers would do very poorly on it the results
00:09:20.680
come back they can see their results they can see the other people's results and they have a an opinion
00:09:26.800
that they did very well they cannot see is not apparent to them that they did very poorly so they
00:09:33.460
don't have any sense that they need to study more or change the way they go about the problem
00:09:39.220
so dunning-kruger effect basically is that some people seem to be immune to the normal signals the
00:09:48.760
rest of us get from uh other people or comparisons we do between ourselves and what other people are
00:09:53.980
doing to get the signal that i should be doing better i'm not very good at this i have to try a
00:09:58.500
different way at the same time some people who are highly competent at solving this problem and do it
00:10:05.120
quickly have the illusion that other people will do it very quickly too they don't perceive that other
00:10:12.740
people will be struggling more than they are so it's kind of an interesting effect but the the big idea
00:10:17.820
for learning is not everybody has the ability or are naturally drawn to skills of seeing where they stack
00:10:27.940
up in terms of whether they know something or not and this becomes a very important point for learning
00:10:33.660
which is if you engage in low productive strategies like focusing on cramming and rereading and mass
00:10:40.400
practice and you think you're on top of it you don't have very good judgment of what you know and can
00:10:45.920
do unless later you require yourself to do it again and see in fact can i really do this and compare
00:10:54.180
what you're able to do later with what you thought you were on top of can the dunning-kruger effect
00:11:00.040
be overcome if you have that tendency or is it sort of you're kind of the deck deck stacked against you
00:11:06.040
yeah i think there is some evidence from this study that they did that there was a logic problem
00:11:14.120
involved in this study and that when the low performers some subset of the low performers
00:11:20.520
were taught how syllogisms work and how to evaluate a syllogism to see whether the conclusion
00:11:27.620
holds up based on the argument they actually improved in their subsequent attempts to
00:11:35.500
you know take the test which was a logic test whereas others of their low performing group
00:11:40.820
were given some unrelated instruction did not improve in subsequent ones so some evidence that
00:11:46.760
you can you can teach people how to be more effective in judging their performance and changing it
00:11:54.200
so another i mean i would say call it an excuse that people give for you know not being a good
00:12:01.200
learner is that they'll just say well i'm just not smart i don't have a high iq or you know i'm not a
00:12:05.840
genius does iq limit how well someone can learn or is learning a skill that anyone can develop in and
00:12:13.180
increase in yes i think to both questions i think i i q does have some impact on on your potential but
00:12:23.080
everyone using effective strategies can substantially bring up their mental abilities the more you know
00:12:29.760
the more you can learn and if you get involved if you think about let's say a video game which i've
00:12:37.060
never played but i have some rough idea that you get involved in in a series of challenges that you
00:12:42.720
have to go to different levels and you try different strategies and then you fall back and you try
00:12:47.160
different and you go forward that notion of trial and error and learning from trial and error you begin
00:12:53.320
to build a mental model of what this game is about and how it works and through that mental model you're able
00:13:00.320
to anticipate certain pitfalls and progress in the game so when you become an effective learner by using
00:13:09.880
strategies that help you learn concepts as well as facts and then build on them with subsequent
00:13:16.160
learning you begin to build mental models that increase your intellectual ability regardless of
00:13:20.720
your iq these strategies are effective yeah before we get to these specific strategies one more myth
00:13:27.020
that you you guys talk about in the book is this idea of learning styles i remember learning this in
00:13:31.780
like middle school and you know the social studies teacher i remember there was like whole lesson like
00:13:36.480
some people are auditory learners some people are kinetic learners some people are visual learners and i
00:13:42.480
remember i took some sort of quiz and i found out that i was a visual learner and then you know for
00:13:47.220
a couple years is like well no don't don't tell me this thing i got to look at it because that's what
00:13:51.240
i so the is there anything is there anything true about these different learning styles well the short answer
00:13:59.120
to that is there's no evidence that supports that person's learning preference actually leads to better
00:14:06.560
learning there's been a meta study that is a study of all the studies into learning styles that have
00:14:12.380
been done and looking at the criteria for valid scientific analysis and none of the studies that purport to
00:14:21.940
support this notion that auditory learners learn better when materials presented in an auditory fashion
00:14:27.980
than if it's presented in a visual fashion there's no study out there that's a valid scientific study
00:14:34.960
that supports that case however it's conceivable that i don't think this has been tested but i think
00:14:42.980
we have to say if someone prefers to learn in a certain way and the materials presented in that way they might
00:14:50.740
stick with it longer if you take my meaning and learn more so that's you know i have to give that
00:14:57.380
bit of a hedge but in fact all learners learn best when the material is presented in the form that fits
00:15:04.380
the material best so solid geometry needs to be a visual language needs to be a combination of visual and aural
00:15:11.480
and like if putt you know doing the 20 foot putt that needs to be kinetic obviously you need to move around
00:15:16.660
right okay so let's get into what the research actually says about the best way to learn so so far we said it's not
00:15:24.200
cramming it's not repeating things over and over again it's not reading your notes over and over again
00:15:30.160
it's not practicing that putt from the same spot over and over again listening might you know it might
00:15:35.820
help you stick with it longer but not won't help you necessarily learn things better so what what does
00:15:42.020
the research say on the most effective strategies for long-term mastery of a of a subject or a concept
00:15:48.960
although a fundamental idea is that if you want to make learning stick and you want to build on it
00:15:56.340
you have to practice getting out of the brain and not getting it into the brain so all these things
00:16:01.600
you think about in terms of review and that kind of thing after you've read it once or twice
00:16:07.760
what really will help you is putting it aside and asking yourself what are the main ideas of this
00:16:15.160
how do they relate to what i already know how would i put it in my own words explaining it to somebody
00:16:20.900
else this effort to pull it out of the brain really you become a coach to your brain to make it stick
00:16:27.500
so that's one idea and i want to talk a little bit more about that in a minute but the second big idea
00:16:33.420
is there's certain kinds of difficulties that cognitive psychologists at ucla robert bjork and
00:16:41.220
elizabeth bjork have termed desirable difficulties and they're desirable because they require you to
00:16:48.080
wrestle with the material in ways that reflect how you're going to need to call it up again later
00:16:54.140
and apply it so practice at recalling the knowledge later spaced out when it's harder to recall
00:17:03.900
strengthens both the connection of that material in your brain and your ability to recall it again
00:17:11.220
subsequently so spacing out your practice instead of doing it over and over and over again in rapid
00:17:17.500
succession putting some time between it so you've got it's a little difficult you're a little rusty
00:17:22.140
at it and then recalling it another strategy that's very effective is to interleave or mix
00:17:29.840
the practice of recalling different types of problems or questions that are somewhat related if
00:17:37.660
you're studying for example solid geometry instead of practicing five examples of finding the volume of
00:17:46.700
spheroid and then five examples of the volume of wedge and so forth mix up the examples or if you're
00:17:55.140
hitting your golf ball mix it up because each time then you come back to the 20-foot putt after having
00:18:02.080
done some others you have to reload if you will from your memory what's required to succeed at the 20-foot
00:18:09.780
putt and that act of reloading that from your memory strengthens the learning even though
00:18:16.020
you don't do as well it doesn't feel like you're learning as well it's a much more potent way
00:18:21.840
of embedding the skills for your 20-foot putt and being able to recall them again later so retrieval
00:18:29.280
that is spaced out and that is mixed up are very potent strategies for making learning stick
00:18:35.600
and creating the nuanced understanding that you're going to need later to properly identify what kind
00:18:41.780
of a problem you're looking at and picking the right solution all right so there's a lot to unpack
00:18:45.660
there i think another factor i think one of the big points i got from the book you know you're doing
00:18:50.900
it right you know you're doing these things with retrieval spaced out and interleave when if it feels
00:18:56.000
hard right it feels like you're not like you feel like you're actually not making any progress that's
00:19:01.960
actually when you are probably making progress yeah that's really that's a that's a unfortunate
00:19:07.700
if we tend to think if it feels hard i'm not getting it or if it feels hard maybe i'm not smart
00:19:14.740
enough for this and the fact is what you're doing when you're really learning is you're moving material
00:19:20.160
from short-term memory to long-term memory which happens over hours sleep helps it's the brain
00:19:25.720
rehearses this knowledge it tries to isolate the most important pieces find the connection
00:19:31.840
and so forth and the effort actually in long-term memory you're actually physically making new
00:19:39.360
connections between neurons in your brain short-term memory is just electrical and chemical traces
00:19:44.440
but long-term memory is physical change to the brain and that's why it takes time and the kind of
00:19:50.640
effort of mental engagement that makes you think maybe i'm not getting it because it feels hard
00:19:56.280
is part of the process of making those connections between the correct neurons and building that into
00:20:03.780
a long-term memory yeah that little bit i that's been great for my son because you know i think you
00:20:09.460
know when he was learning to tie his shoes we're in the middle of that and he's like oh dad this is so
00:20:14.120
hard and he's just like just do it for me i just tell him hey gus you know because it's hard it means
00:20:18.580
you're actually learning how to do this so just keep at it and like he's like okay dad and so
00:20:22.180
that's been an effective little metacognition thing i've used on it if it's hard it means you're
00:20:27.060
you're learning it brad i have the same situation i if i go to the genius bar or something with a
00:20:33.420
problem with my ipad and then the expert there the genius will will say here it goes like this and
00:20:39.320
just click through a bunch of things oh okay fine well that should have me do it because when i do it
00:20:46.660
and it's hard i'm more likely to remember it again later than if i just see someone do it and it
00:20:52.160
looks easy so same with tying the shoes right you have to struggle with it right um so let's go
00:20:57.560
back to some like specific tactics on how we can do some of this retrieval spacing out and mixing
00:21:02.740
it up so retrieval so you mentioned a few things you can do if you're reading material you close the
00:21:07.420
book and you ask yourself some questions what's the main topic i mean what are some other things
00:21:12.600
you can do besides that to integrate that retrieval process into your learning method
00:21:17.280
well of course it depends on the on the subject if it's semantic learning if it's mathematics or
00:21:26.120
history something like that you want to elaborate on it when you learn it you want to pause and ask
00:21:33.760
yourself how does this relate to what i already know is there any way to visualize this because
00:21:38.880
memory it requires not only having it wired in your brain but it requires
00:21:43.540
cues pathways to call it up when you need it and so part of improving or making it stick when you read
00:21:52.420
or hear a lecture or exposed to something abstract is to try to make it less abstract by thinking through
00:21:59.240
how it connects to what you already know or thinking of some kind of visual example in the book i was
00:22:05.100
thinking about different ways of heat transfer and how you would illustrate that and you know that
00:22:09.000
conductive if you're holding a cup of warm coffee you can feel that heat conducting through and radiant
00:22:16.140
you can feel this the warmth of the sun coming through the windows and the den on a winter day and
00:22:22.020
convective you can you can feel that cold blast of air from your uncle's air conditioner in the car when
00:22:27.000
you're going through the steamy streets of atlanta so you need to a have ways of stopping and not just
00:22:33.080
trying to memorize radiant conductive and convective heat transfer but imagine it and explain it and
00:22:41.380
relate it to your life another thing you can make flashcards flashcards are very potent and there are now
00:22:48.680
many websites where you can download an app and you can either find flashcards already constructed or
00:22:55.660
you can make your own flashcards and program the app so that periodically it gives you a little quiz
00:23:03.820
and then you can space out how often you're asked certain kinds of questions so that they they come less
00:23:13.440
and less often as long as you can still recall them you want to space it further out so it continues to be a
00:23:18.760
little bit difficult in the case of golf or basketball i was talking to a friend of mine who coaches
00:23:23.820
basketball and i was talking about mixed practice and he said oh we do that we have uh the players
00:23:29.000
run a circuit on the court and at each different station they they make a different move well that
00:23:35.860
isn't exactly mixed practice because if you're always doing a free throw from a certain spot it's
00:23:41.060
like the old lps we used to have where you always knew what was coming up next when you heard this song
00:23:45.800
you need to vary it you need to scramble it you need to go random so if you're trying to improve your
00:23:51.300
your basketball game or your golf game or your bmx bike stunts you need to mix it up those are some
00:23:57.980
quick things low stakes quizzing and if you're an instructor you're working with your kids or you're
00:24:04.220
working with students low stakes that is low anxiety quizzing is a very powerful way to help learners lock
00:24:13.560
in something and carry it forward over time and when you have a quiz three weeks from now it should not
00:24:20.060
just be about recent stuff it should have a few questions from earlier so that gets carried
00:24:25.000
forward and updated with the new material when i was in law i went to law school and by the time i got
00:24:30.720
to law school i kind of started figuring things out intuitively on how to study better and i actually
00:24:34.720
started doing some of this stuff just intuitively like for the retrieval what i one of my my routine
00:24:40.260
was i'd have class i'd take notes and after class i would take 20 minutes to sort of put my notes
00:24:46.580
into an outline then i would close everything up and i'd answer these hypothetical questions
00:24:51.240
based on the material that we learned well that's great how did you come to that because that's
00:24:55.780
really an excellent way to do it i don't know i just decided that was what i needed to do because
00:24:59.760
like well what i what what it was was i i knew i learned from the beginning that your final grade was
00:25:05.180
determined by these essays right these three-hour essays you write where you have to unpack all these
00:25:10.840
legal issues and analyze them and come out with a solution so i just started doing these little
00:25:14.900
practice ones for just little discrete topics within law so if it was like tort law you know
00:25:20.380
we learned about battery i would learn about battery do my notes shut everything down then
00:25:24.880
answer this like three or four hypotheticals about battery and analyzing that and what was
00:25:29.900
interesting and this was kind of interesting point too sometimes the hypotheticals had issues that
00:25:33.920
i had no idea about but i still tried to answer it and that's one of the i was really surprised
00:25:39.400
to see that one of the the suggestions was for retrieval is you actually want it's a good way
00:25:45.200
to good way an effective way to teach people things is quiz them before they actually learn the material
00:25:50.060
because then it causes them to pay attention more when they actually hear the material so they can learn
00:25:54.620
it yeah it has a potentiating effect in the mind so it yes it causes them to pay attention
00:26:00.180
but if someone asks you to name the capital of you know montana and you search your mind for the
00:26:08.080
different cities in montana even if you get it wrong when you're told the capital is helena
00:26:15.940
ah you're right oh helena yes you will remember that better because you have wrestled with that
00:26:22.020
question and when the answer comes it fits in there the mind is ready for it so the scientists call this
00:26:29.400
a generation you're trying to generate an answer you and there's there's been fear in education for
00:26:35.700
years that if we let students make mistakes they'll learn the errors well this has been researched
00:26:40.220
quite thoroughly and it's not the case if you let students make mistakes on their way forward and they
00:26:46.780
get corrective feedback it's a very effective way of learning and you don't remember the error so the
00:26:54.120
old-fashioned trial and error turns out to be very effective but we don't like to get things wrong
00:27:01.560
so we don't like making mistakes we want to know what this is about and not be embarrassed because
00:27:11.180
we think mistakes are an indictment of our abilities so uh for retrieval sort of some quick takeaways if
00:27:17.120
you're a college student i guess after your lecture find ways to get that information out of your brain
00:27:23.020
either writing a summary from your brain you know don't looking at your notes of what you learned in
00:27:28.360
class that day could be just a paragraph to spend 10 minutes or it could just be quizzing yourself
00:27:32.920
really quickly that's some really easy things you can they college students start doing today right and
00:27:39.800
then look back after you've made your list or your paragraph or your statement and check what did i miss
00:27:46.460
and put that in or did i get this a little bit wrong that you could even go to the the questions at the
00:27:53.080
back of the book if there's chapter questions and try answering those at the end of reading your chapter
00:27:57.020
so going to that other tactic of spacing things out so typically with cramming like you're just
00:28:03.340
you're waiting until like the last few days before the exam and then you're just like putting all that
00:28:07.920
information to your brain so you can dump it out onto you know your your exam yeah binge and purge
00:28:13.200
binge and purge right that's it's a great way to describe it with spacing things out say you one week
00:28:18.600
you you learn this one topic and you review that stuff and you do sort of the retrieval things there
00:28:24.140
immediately after you'd want to wait another week and see if you can retrieve that stuff from memory
00:28:29.920
again correct yeah one of the questions we get is how long how far should i space this stuff out
00:28:36.800
and it depends on what it is if you go to a party and you learn someone's name you know you need to
00:28:41.600
repeat it in your head very quickly thereafter then use it a couple more times maybe associate it with
00:28:47.080
an image so you when to retrieve when to practice retrieving spaced retrieval really depends on how
00:28:54.620
hard it's going to be for you to get it you don't want to have to relearn it so some stuff you might
00:28:59.380
recall the next day some stuff you might want to wait for a week and the easier it is to recall the
00:29:05.660
longer you should wait to try recalling it because we haven't really talked about consolidation of learning
00:29:11.000
long-term memory but it's a very central to this whole discussion that when the brain has to work
00:29:17.540
to reconsolidate something that you've learned that you're trying again that's hard again it does
00:29:23.420
an even better job of knowing what are the key ideas and what they connect to that you already know
00:29:30.120
and getting rid of the stuff that you don't need to remember so that's why spacing out retrieval practice
00:29:36.620
helps you lock it in embed it and have the cues you need to recall it again later and there's
00:29:44.060
actually flash card systems that that do this um like algorithmically right i think i've used them
00:29:49.900
before online where you create your flash cards and it'll show you the ones that you have the most
00:29:56.700
difficulty with like more frequently and the ones you don't have any problem they won't show them to
00:30:01.460
you but then right you know as you progress and you add to the flash cards you're going to see
00:30:06.020
flash cards you studied you know three weeks ago enter come back again every now and then i remember
00:30:12.160
when that happened to be like oh i don't really know this stuff and i had to work to remember it
00:30:16.760
right that's exactly right and you want to make sure the flash cards come randomly yeah not in a set
00:30:23.080
pattern not yeah well that goes back to mixing things up yeah which is an important thing and you
00:30:27.880
made this interesting point the way typically we teach things here in america is like if you're in math
00:30:33.160
you're going to do you know if you're in algebra you're going to do uh you know certain things
00:30:38.040
for like a chapter and that's all you do it's only things you see but then when you get to the test
00:30:42.680
like you see multiple chapters all mixed together and it really throws i mean it threw me off i didn't
00:30:49.400
do very well in math and i think it was a lot of a lot of that to do with because i was suddenly put
00:30:54.960
into this position where i had to recall information and it mixed up matter than i that i hadn't seen
00:30:58.820
before it's it's true that the traditional ways that we've taught various topics is by blocking them
00:31:09.660
by units a unit on this it might be solid geometry it might be whatever different units and you march
00:31:16.100
forward through that but then you get to the the end and you're quizzed or tested on stuff from way
00:31:23.720
back earlier and that's not a good way to teach we need to find a way to intermingle these topics
00:31:32.220
get a little bit on one then go on to another and bring the earlier one forward and get on to another
00:31:37.220
one and bring them forward through low stakes quizzing and other forms of active engagement in the
00:31:43.760
classroom so that you don't like leave it behind and go on if you think about football players
00:31:50.980
preparing for saturday night's game in that week of practice they're not only practicing plays for
00:31:59.000
this particular opposition they're also periodically refreshing their core moves that they have that
00:32:07.460
are important as a team and this is what we need to do in the classroom is a practice like we want to
00:32:13.720
play at the end of the term when we have the exam which is retrieving those ideas and concepts and
00:32:20.960
demonstrating that we we're on top of them as we go along yeah the football example uh brought back a lot
00:32:27.720
of memories i played football in high school and the schedule that you you showed i think it was the
00:32:31.780
university of georgia that you know kind of yes vince duly was the coach right like we follow that so
00:32:37.180
you know you start off practice in your individual positions and you'd practice you know basic
00:32:41.960
movements if i was alignments we practice blocking and then we would get together with the linemen and
00:32:47.660
maybe the running backs and practice running plays that we would use in the play and then and then by
00:32:52.240
the end of the practice the whole team was together and we were running full place full speed with the
00:32:57.860
team in mind we were playing that saturday yeah so if you take that a metaphor and apply it to
00:33:03.200
to classroom learning and think of yourself as the team you're the whole team that means you want to
00:33:08.820
take the different parts of the material you're learning and continue to engage them in in the
00:33:15.000
learning and the testing going forward one thing we haven't mentioned you had asked about the dunning
00:33:20.680
kruger effect of people who are not aware of their low performance and therefore don't work to bring it up
00:33:28.140
a really valuable part of spaced retrieval or low stakes quizzing which is basically the same thing
00:33:34.600
is we're often poor judges of what we know and can do and quizzing or flashcards the spaced practice
00:33:45.220
where you actually you don't just look at the question and say yeah i know it you actually answer
00:33:49.360
it you actually do the play on the field you actually do you know play hit the 20 foot punt or
00:33:55.220
whatever it is that is really important because we're always needing to recalibrate our judgment of
00:34:01.500
what we know and it can do and where we discover it's difficult for us we're not quite getting it
00:34:06.800
then we know that's something i need to practice more often to bring up to snuff all right so that
00:34:11.820
this is really important yeah if you feel like you're an expert like you've been doing something
00:34:15.120
for years to occasionally go back to the basics because you might discover no you've actually had
00:34:21.720
some skill degradation can improve on that one little aspect and you see some of the hyper most
00:34:26.360
high performing athletes do this like they'll that's why they have coaches to help them spot those
00:34:30.560
little things that they might not see yeah i i interviewed a political economics professor at
00:34:36.580
washington university in st louis who had heard about this research and uh he threw out his midterms
00:34:43.280
and his final exams and he told his students this is a survey course of about 175 students
00:34:48.580
there's going to be nine quizzes each quiz is going to be worth 10 of your grade and these are the
00:34:53.940
dates that there's going to be a quiz and at the end no final but i'll have the last 10
00:34:58.900
percent discretion in terms of your grade and he said that the the students by midterm his his quizzes
00:35:05.740
by the way reached back so in the third or fourth week there's a quiz about what happened last week
00:35:11.660
but also a couple of questions from earlier in the semester by the middle of the semester they're doing
00:35:16.880
end of semester work by the end of the semester they're doing upper division work he he says as good
00:35:21.540
as a lecturer i i might be i think how much opportunity i've lost to bring students along
00:35:28.300
because i didn't realize the importance of their constructing their own understanding of the material
00:35:33.820
through this kind of retrieval practice so besides these specific tactics of retrieving spacing things
00:35:41.340
out and mixing things in there's also sort of this upper level this higher level thinking we need
00:35:46.540
to do or metacognition which is just our mindset about learning and the approach we take because
00:35:51.700
that can affect whether we learn or not so what role does mindset have in our ability to learn
00:35:57.160
we're still figuring that out but i i think that dr carol dwack at stanford university is has pioneered
00:36:04.940
some research into what she calls a growth mindset as compared to a fixed mindset a fixed mindset
00:36:11.780
is one where you say this feels hard i don't think uh it's probably right for me i'm not really a math
00:36:17.900
person if this is hard for me i'll stay away from math a growth mindset is one that says this is hard
00:36:24.460
for me i'm not i'm not getting it yet but i understand that mistakes are information and i'm going to try a
00:36:30.580
little harder try a little different strategy and that when in her tests uh her research studies when
00:36:37.900
students understand they're actually trying to build new connections in the brain and that over
00:36:44.000
time that those connections will increase their mental abilities those students tend to pick tougher
00:36:48.900
challenges and persist longer at them so i think it's really important for people to interpret is how you
00:36:56.720
interpret difficulty and setbacks the difficulty isn't the problem it's how you interpret it that's the
00:37:02.260
problem the difficulty is information but if you interpret it as personal failure or a lack of
00:37:08.860
aptitude you know you don't have the chops really for this field you're not gonna you're not gonna do
00:37:15.280
very well at it so mindset's very important and there's more research ongoing about what kinds of
00:37:22.060
interventions with students can help them embrace this kind of a mindset that will cause them to be
00:37:28.760
more comfortable with difficulty and persistence and also you need to be look on lookout for you
00:37:34.980
know i in your own kids or yourself it's like well this is easy i'm i'm i'm really smart but i i really
00:37:40.860
know this stuff because that can actually prevent you from going on to become you know learning more
00:37:46.000
than you than you do it that right now all right so i think we all love a challenge we like puzzles
00:37:51.680
we like the video games we like various kinds of challenges so we can see we get kind of hooked on that
00:37:58.220
can i do this what would you know how does it work what's another way to do it and get it done
00:38:03.080
but when we're set in a position of having to learn something in particular we don't like that we want to
00:38:10.860
hear what it is and we want to be able to do it and if we're having trouble with it it feels icky
00:38:16.000
and one of the issues that dweck talks about is praising young people for effort not for achievement if
00:38:24.040
you continue to praise people for achievement that you know every time they ring the bell
00:38:28.560
they're going to pick problems they know they can achieve and ring the bell if you praise them for
00:38:34.380
effort and for thinking through setbacks for the information that helps them understand what's
00:38:41.540
important for learning it isn't so much whether you get it in the end as it is that you are pursuing
00:38:48.700
it and you are trying different strategies and trying a little harder uh towards your goal in
00:38:54.140
most cases you'll be able to achieve your goal so uh how we how we praise and how we talk about
00:39:01.480
difficulty has a lot of influence on how students feel about themselves when they go into a learning
00:39:09.700
situation i would just like to say um i was very struck when leonard cohen the musician died
00:39:15.940
recently and i was re-listening to a lot of his music he has this a great stanza in one of his
00:39:22.740
songs he says ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there's a crack in
00:39:31.300
everything that's how the light gets in so when we're out trying to find our way and we stumble
00:39:40.460
instead of feeling like we're losers we gotta say ah there's some information i can use there's light
00:39:49.300
there there's information i'm going to use that and give ourselves a break and press on that's a
00:39:56.820
fantastic way to end peter where can people go to learn more about your work in the book well make
00:40:02.300
it stick the science of successful learning it's of course on amazon thank you so much for your time
00:40:08.380
it's been a pleasure my guest today was peter brown he's the author of the book make it stick
00:40:12.240
the science of successful learning it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also
00:40:16.540
check out his website at make it stick.net where you find more information and also check out our
00:40:21.160
show notes at aom.is make it stick where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into
00:40:25.880
this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips
00:40:42.380
and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com if
00:40:45.820
you enjoy the podcast i've gotten something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on
00:40:48.700
itunes or stitcher helps out a lot and if you've already done that thank you please share the show
00:40:52.300
with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it as always thank you for
00:40:56.240
your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly