Brief Review: “Make It Stick”
“Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning” by Peter Brown is an interesting book that summarizes some of the key psychology and brain development research around learning and effective learning techniques.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning a number of routine tasks, skills, and jobs will be replaced by robots or software. There are a number of things humans are uniquely (currently!) better than machine at — including coming up with creative solutions and solving problems that have not been seen before. To leverage those strengths and to generally improve and enrich our lives I’m very interested in what it takes to quantify and improve our human learning capabilities.
This book nicely summarizes some of our learning fallacies and provides research evidence coupled with anecdotal examples to help illustrate some of the proven effective learning strategies. Couple key take-aways:
- Debunks the concept of learning styles (auditory, visual) — stating that there is no evidence to support more effective learning for certain styles.
- Highlights the importance of active learning. Passive learning —listening or reading over and over again — simply does not “stick”. Some form of generation….synthesizing, summarizing, or re-explaining to others are good ways to process the information and commit it in a more durable way.
- Frequent, low stakes quizzes are helpful.
- Interleaving is also an effective strategy. I found this one surprising — I thought repeating the same material over and over again till mastered would be more effective, but the research shows that jumping from material to material in an interleaved fashion helps deepen the learning (and presumably able to recall, apply it more effectively).
These blogs share some more detailed summaries as well:
