Mark A. McDaniel

We’re often tempted to cram, but that’s an ineffective strategy for true learning, which requires interrupted/varied practice and things like quick quizzes or flashcards—effortful retrieval and the process of putting concepts into our own words enhance learning, even if they feel less helpful than rereading the material or “mass practice” (solving a bunch of the same type of problems at once). Repetition alone increases the feeling of knowledge, but not the reality—I was charmed show more by the example of trying to figure out which of various images is the real image of a penny (google “penny test”). You’ve seen it zillions of times, but that doesn’t mean you know it. People resist this conclusion because they feel like repetition and “massed practice” helps, but the studies consistently show it doesn’t. That sense of struggle that comes from delayed/interleaved practice is actually a sign of enhanced learning. The authors advocate low-stakes quizzing and self-testing; I’m still thinking about how to implement low-stakes quizzing in a larger classroom. (I have to confess that I did very little of my own studying using the recommended techniques, at least consciously. I usually relied on raw processing power, though I did take a lot of notes and I do believe that writing stuff down in your own words is a great way to learn the concepts better.) I loved the authors’ analogy between beginning learning and a bad first draft, since I’m a huge believer in forcing oneself to produce a bad first draft as a way to get to the good final draft. show less

Excellent, excellent excellent! I cannot adequately convey how great this book is. From the way that it practices what it preaches through its varied and interleavened structure; it’s creative real-world examples; its division of advice for students, life long learners, teacher and coaches; it’s summation of a decade of cognitive neuroscience into an easily digestible format— 10/10. This should be at the top of the reading list of any teachers, educators, coaches, high school or show more university students, parents or anyone interested in improving educational outcomes for themselves or anyone in their lives. I wish that I had found this book earlier in my educational career as it would have saved me countless hours of stress and fruitless rereading of course material. show less

I love how practical this book is, and how easily we can implement the changes highlighted in the book. Speaking of, don't bother actually highlighting anything in the book or rereading it, either. It was an enjoyable listen, and there are so many beneficial lessons within. Whether you're a student, teacher, trainer, or life long learner, you have the ability to tailor your approach to learning - why not make it stick?

A friend recommended that I dive into this book since I was hoping to learn about the latest theories on learning and cognition; one reason for my search is to be a better coach with volleyball athletes, but as it turns out, this book is helping me become a better college professor.

The authors devoted the opening chapter to the myths and sacred cows that we carry in our minds about how we learn and how to best create an environment that is suited for teaching. They recount the large number show more of beliefs that many hold dear as the absolutely truth and then give evidence which debunks them one by one.

The central tenet for the book is stated clearly very early in the first chapter: learning needs memory and the ability to recall from the memory; people will need to continue to learn and remember throughout our lives in order to function; and finally learning is an acquired skill, not a natural skill, one that need to be practiced.

Very early on in this book, the authors laid out their own beliefs. The first is that learning needs to be effortful in order to be effective, that is, we learn better when learning is difficult. They also believe that people tend to be poor judges when it comes to determining how well we learn a subject; we often overestimate our learning prowess. One of their biggest pet myths is that rereading and massed practices - the perennially preferred studying practice of most people - is the worst and least effective practice habit.

What do they believe in? They believe that learning comes from our ability to retrieve knowledge from our memory, and that we need to exercise that memory retrieval constantly in order to makes sure that it is always there for our recall. They believe that the exercise of retrieval and recall needs to be done with built in gaps in timing, i.e. they need to be spaced; they believe in making the repetitions be unpredictable and irregularly spaced in time, i.e. interleaved. They believe that before being shown how to resolve a problem, the learner needs to wade into the problem without any clue as to how to solve the problem. They believe that searching for and discovering the underlying reasons for a piece of knowledge is much more important that just being able to perform a skill repetitively, although they do acknowledge the importance of being able to repeat a task procedurally.

Although the ideas and methods that is covered in this book is not all completely new to me, the presentation and organization is quite interesting. They can cite a great number of studies in the scientific literature that effectively and sufficiently support their arguments against the stated myths while citing enough studies which also amply support their arguments. The most interesting part of the book came to me after I had read it from cover to cover and was sitting down to review what I had learned. What the authors cleverly did is to use the very desired practices that they are espousing in structuring the book. They spaced the same descriptions of the desired practice repeatedly through the text, they interleaved certain arguments in all the chapters, they gave the reader time and room to discern the underlying principles, and they motivated the reader to elaborate on what they had learned to themselves, at least I did.

I am relatively certain that this was deliberate. Indeed, I followed the rut that they had called out in their recitation of bad learning habits and strategies as I was reading, rereading, and taking massive amounts of notes in order forcefully lever the ideas into my head. Little did I know that the authors had, by the nature of how the book is structured, created an opportunity for the reader to practice what they had preached.

As I stepped through my memories of the time that I was reading this book, along with a couple of other books on how to best learn, I unintentionally spaced and interleaved my learning from this book because I was switching between books, a practice that I had picked up as a matter of habit as my learning habit throughout my life. The real question is then whether this tactic was successful: did it accomplish the goals in the way that the authors had intended? I can’t speak for the longevity memory retention of the lesson from the book, but I can say that I did spend a lot of time thinking and understanding the underlying principles. I will be able to speak to the longevity of my learning with their preferred methods when someone asks me about the book in a few years, but as of now, I had worked long and hard on learning from this book. show less