4 Strategies From ‘Make It Stick’ To Make You a Life-Long Learner
Unlearning the concepts of learning
There are numerous occasions where I find myself struggling to recall information from what I’ve read in a book or an article or sometimes, in my course material. I wondered if knowledge is leaking out from my memory.
To remedy this situation, the most straightforward strategy I found was to bookmark important articles and highlight passages in books. With a massive list of bookmarks that I rarely use and a pile of books waiting to be re-read, I searched for a better strategy that would help me retain more while reading instead of redoing the whole process again.
Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel draws upon years of research and cognitive psychology to present strategies that would help us get the most of what we read or learn in a class. These strategies have helped students, actors, doctors, and athletes perform better in their fields, so let’s dive in.
Retrieval Practice
The usual strategy we adopt for review is to read from start to finish and review the highlighted passages and notes. However, it turns out that just like a learning curve, we have a forgetting curve. We forget a considerable percentage of what we read, shortly after we read it.
An effective strategy is to try and recall what we learned by quizzing ourselves. This has a two-fold effect — it helps you see the gaps in your knowledge, and quizzing yourself on the central precepts enables you to focus on the main idea of a text.
Generation
Writers’ block is usually a result of not having a clear idea of what you want to say. John McPhee, a Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer, shared his strategy. He wrote a letter to his mother explaining his struggle with the concept, how he feels about it and what he hoped to write about it. This letter would eventually turn out to be the first draft of the article he was working on.
This “clumsy” way of encountering a new subject engages your mind in trying to make sense of things and drawing connections with what it already knows. You can engage your mind by explaining this new concept to yourself or someone else, drawing parallels or visualizing it, not by re-reading the text.
Reflection
Reflection is one of the best strategies to refine your understanding of any subject. It involves retrieval, invoking imagery, and mental rehearsal, which cements the concept in memory and acts as a medium for forming newer connections. A surgeon whose operations involve complex time-bound steps, an athlete executing complicated moves, or a musician practising a complex melody — all use reflection, consciously or unconsciously, for refining their skills.
Reflection can also be expanded to the emotional sphere. We can observe our responses in a situation and evaluate our behavior. This not only increases our self-awareness but also makes us more open-minded, an essential prerequisite for learning.
Elaboration
Experts in any field are known to spend thousands of hours of deliberate practice (practising at the edges of their abilities) and build mental models that they can use for a wide variety of situations that they might encounter.
Take, for example, soccer players playing futsal, where the area of play is smaller, and the ball is heavier. The limited space helps them develop models to tackle situations where they have to work themselves out of a tight spot on the field, and the heavier ball helps them learn ball handling better. This technique is pioneered by Brazilian soccer players who are consistently successful on the field.
As a voracious reader, always reading books of different genres, I sometimes found it frustrating that I couldn’t recall what I’ve previously read in a discussion.
The first strategies I then adopted were— generation and reflection. I started explaining to myself or a friend what I understood what I thought of it. It has transformed the way I read and enriched the discussions I have with the people around me.
It’s been only a month since I tested these strategies, and I can already see the benefits. I hope you can find something to enrich your reading too!
