40 pages • 1 hour read
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDanielMake It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Mix Up Your Practice”
The authors continue to distinguish between short-term and long-term learning and suggest that in order for learned information to be useful, it needs to be recalled and made applicable in the long-term.
Massed practice—recalling the same information again and again in a row—is a long-favored strategy among educators, tempting because learners see real-time progress. The authors denounce massed practice as an ineffective strategy as rapid learning without spaced, interleaved, and varied practice is followed by rapid forgetting (47).
Spaced practice involves returning to subjects or skills after increments of time that allow for some degree of forgetting, so the resulting recall is effortful.
Interleaved practice involves learning and practicing several skills or subjects at the same time rather than moving on from one to another. Studies show that this strategy is effective in durable “mastery and long-term retention” (50).
Varied practice—practicing related skills or intersecting subjects in addition to target skills—aids learning because it “improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another” (51).
All of these practice strategies help learners to “assess context and discriminate between problems, selecting and applying the correct solution from a range of possibilities” (53). The broader range of related and overlapping knowledge amassed from spaced, interleaved, and varied practice makes learned knowledge practical. Learners can then identify when to utilize their nuanced understanding of different subjects—which is a much deeper level of understanding than mere recitation or replication of isolated information.
The authors again highlight these strategies as counterintuitive. They acknowledge interleaved practice as feeling slow and “sluggish” (50). They argue, however, that the long-term advantages are well worth the initial struggle.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Embrace Difficulties”
This chapter discusses the mental mechanics of learning in detail. Learning starts with encoding information, a process through which the mind makes representations of perceptions and sensations. Consolidation, the next step in the process, takes these initial representations and gives them understandable meaning. During consolidation, the brain starts to transform short-term memory into long-term memory. Consolidated information can, with practice, be retrieved and utilized in the future. Retrieving information allows it to be reconsolidated—updated—and better remembered because periodic retrieval is spaced practice. Encoded and consolidated information can also be forgotten if not regularly retrieved.
The authors explain, “There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember,” but “our retrieval capacity […] is severely limited” (76). Retrieval is instantaneous and practical. People could not function properly if they constantly recalled all of their stored knowledge; they retrieve information that is readily applicable to the situation at hand. The authors also discuss retrieval cues—the sparks that recall intended information from the brain’s archive of knowledge—and how “tricky” they are due to changes over time (77). Learned information is not static. For example, Americans learn to drive on the right side of the road, but should they drive in England, they must relearn cues to apply their knowledge of operating a vehicle to driving on the left side of the road (77).
Beyond altering cues, the brain needs to forget some information in order to learn new things. For example, switching from using a PC computer to a Mac computer. The operating systems and programs have shared functions but different interfaces. A user has to unlearn their old manual and replace this knowledge with the new one.
The authors discuss several types of difficulties that can aid learning in certain circumstances. Interference (misspelled words in a text, etc.) forces learners to work harder to make sense of material they’re trying to input—and therefore, stand to learn said material better with the effort required (86-87). Generating open-ended responses is another difficult and effective way to learn. Failure is also key to the learning process. Learners who understand errors as reflective and effort as a means of increased insight learn better than those who see them as proof of inability.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
The authors continue to revisit and elaborate on earlier points in new contexts. Chapter 3 develops the authors’ arguments about what types of practice make for stronger or weaker learning, and Chapter 4 discusses the benefits of struggle and effort while practicing. The authors also begin to refer to previous examples, but not in full, instead offering key details and explicitly asking the reader to recall the rest. They ask the reader to retrieve from memory or reference the broader context of which they allude; in doing so, they can draw connections to new information and strengthen their understanding of the material.
This section, unlike the first, incorporates motor skills in many of its examples. Chapter 3 discusses studies that measured subjects’ ability to perform tasks like throwing bean bags at a target. The authors also reference athletic coaching and skills specific to certain sports. They briefly mention that different parts of the brain are involved in different types of learning, however, they don’t go into detail as to how this alters neuroscience or the learning process. They hold that strategies good for cognitive learning are also good for learning motor skills.
This overlap with motor skills raises some questions about the application of learning science within the realm of sports. The authors briefly mention that “The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our effort” (63). While this pattern is true in cognitive learning, it has an obvious overlap with motor skills and sports psychology (a field in which none of the authors claim to have any experience or expertise). Motivation is a key part of athletic training, as participation in sports (unlike school) is usually voluntary. The need to maintain morale by fueling athletes’ senses of accomplishment might render massed practice useful for a reason other than its relative effectiveness for durable learning. In Chapter 4, the authors recount an experiment in baseball that revealed the relative benefit of interleaved practice instead of massed practice in six weeks—but there is little discussion of timelines for motor skill-learning and how these timelines intersect with competition seasons. The authors admit that the field of learning science is ripe for more research. Such is the nature of cutting-edge science: It reveals patterns but does not provide definitive answers to all related questions.
