How to learn better using desirable difficulty, spaced repetition, generation and reflection. Practical advice for designing learning environments that prioritise actual learning outcomes rather than a comfortable experience for students. The passage from John McPhee was a particular highlight for me. Highly recommended.
Since as far back as 1885, psychologists have been plotting “forgetting curves” that illustrate just how fast our cranberries slip off the string. In very short order we lose something like 70 percent of what we’ve just heard or read. After that, forgetting begins to slow, and the last 30 percent or so falls away more slowly, but the lesson is clear: a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting. 2 The power of retrieval as a learning tool is known among psychologists as the testing effect.
In his essay on memory, Aristotle wrote: “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.”
Forget memorization, many commenters argued; education should be about high-order skills. Hmmm. If memorization is irrelevant to complex problem solving, don’t tell your neurosurgeon. The frustration many people feel toward standardized, “dipstick” tests given for the sole purpose of measuring learning is understandable, but it steers us away from appreciating one of the most potent learning tools available to us. Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem.
In another study, researchers showed that simply asking a subject to fill in a word’s missing letters resulted in better memory of the word. The modest effort required to generate the cued answer while studying the pairs strengthened memory of the target word tested later (shoe).
Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn’t feel like you’re on top of it. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.
One form of practice that helps us learn from experience, as the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold recounted in Chapter 2, is reflection. Some people are more given to the act of reflection than others, so Doug Larsen has broadened his research to study how you might structure reflection as an integral part of the training, helping students cultivate it as a habit. He is experimenting with requiring students to write daily or weekly summaries of what they did, how it worked, and what they might do differently next time to get better results. He speculates that daily reflection, as a form of spaced retrieval practice, is probably just as critical in the real-world application of medicine as quizzing and testing are in building competencies in medical school.
At a minimum, Larsen would like to see something done to interrupt the forgetting: give a quiz at the end of a conference and follow it with spaced retrieval practice. “Make quizzing a standard part of the culture and the curriculum. You just know every week you’re going to get in your email your ten questions that you need to work through.”
The common term is “learning from experience.” Some people never seem to learn. One difference, perhaps, between those who do and don’t is whether they have cultivated the habit of reflection. Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).
There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.
When you’re asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered. When you’ve bought your fishing boat and are attempting to attach an anchor line, you’re far more likely to learn and remember the bowline knot than when you’re standing in a city park being shown the bowline by a Boy Scout who thinks you would lead a richer life if you had a handful of knots in your repertoire.
The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation. Even if you’re being quizzed on material you’re familiar with, the simple act of filling in a blank has the effect of strengthening your memory of the material and your ability to recall it later. In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits. Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still. Overcoming these mild difficulties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher-order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge conferred by others.
Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).
Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.
The filmmaker Errol Morris, in a series of articles on illusion in the New York Times, quotes the social psychologist David Dunning on humans’ penchant for “motivated reasoning,” or, as Dunning put it, the “sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones.”
Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.
Accounts that sound familiar can create the feeling of knowing and be mistaken for true. This is one reason that political or advertising claims that are not factual but are repeated can gain traction with the public, particularly if they have emotional resonance. Something you once heard that you hear again later carries a warmth of familiarity that can be mistaken for memory, a shred of something you once knew and cannot quite place but are inclined to believe. In the world of propaganda, this is called “the big lie” technique— even a big lie told repeatedly can come to be accepted as truth.
If it’s important, it needs to be practiced, and practiced again. And don’t put stock in momentary gains that result from massed practice. Space your testing, vary your practice, keep the long view.
Peer instruction, a learning model developed by Eric Mazur, incorporates many of the foregoing principles. The material to be covered in class is assigned for reading beforehand. In class, the lecture is interspersed with quick tests that present students with a conceptual question and give them a minute or two to grapple with it; they then try, in small groups, to reach a consensus on the correct answer. In Mazur’s experience, this process engages the students in the underlying concepts of the lecture material; reveals students’ problems in reaching understanding; and provides opportunities for them to explain their understanding, receive feedback, and assess their learning compared to other students. Likewise, the process serves as a gauge for the instructor of how well the students are assimilating the material and in what areas more or less work is needed.
In many fields, the practice of peer review serves as an external gauge, providing feedback on one’s performance. Most medical practice groups have morbidity/ mortality conferences, and if a doctor has a bad patient outcome, it will be presented there. The other doctors will pick it apart, or say “You did a good job, it was just a bad situation.”
Out of college, Bruce went to work for Kodak as a microfilm salesman. In his third year, he was one of five top salesmen in the country. That was the year he found out how much his branch manager was making: less than Bruce made as a salesman, if he factored in his company car and expense account. It pays better to be a rainmaker than a manager: another lesson learned, another step up Bruce’s winding stair.
Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.
Knowledge is not knowhow until you understand the underlying principles at work and can fit them together into a structure larger than the sum of its parts. Knowhow is learning that enables you to go do.
There’s an old truism from sales school that says you can’t shoot a deer from the lodge. The same goes for learning: you have to suit up, get out the door, and find what you’re after. Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test, something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps into your being with old age and gray hair.
This study showed what others have suggested, that the speed of our mental abilities is determined by the robustness of our neural connections; that this robustness, at the initial stages, is largely determined by our genes, but that our neural circuitry does not mature as early as our physical development and instead continues to change and grow through our forties, fifties, and sixties. Part of the maturation of these connections is the gradual thickening of the myelin coating of the axons. Myelination generally starts at the backs of our brains and moves toward the front, reaching the frontal lobes as we grow into adulthood. The frontal lobes perform the executive functions of the brain and are the location of the processes of high-level reasoning and judgment, skills that are developed through experience. The thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, performance.
Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breast-feeding women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by anywhere from 3.5 to 6.5 points. Certain fatty acids provide building blocks for nerve cell development that the body cannot produce by itself, and the theory behind the results is that these supplements support the creation of new synapses.
Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder.
When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
One reason that experts are sometimes perceived to possess an uncanny talent is that some can observe a complex performance in their field and later reconstruct from memory every aspect of that performance, in granular detail. Mozart was famous for being able to reconstruct complex musical scores after a single hearing. But this skill, Ericsson says, rises not out of some sixth sense but from an expert’s superior perception and memory within his domain, which are the result of years of acquired skill and knowledge in that domain. Most people who achieve expertise in a field are destined to remain average performers in the other realms of life.
Mark Twain wrote about his personal experiences with this phenomenon in an article published by Harper’s. In his days on the speaking circuit, Twain used a list of partial sentences to prompt himself through the different phases of his remarks, but he found the system unsatisfactory— when you glance at snippets of text, they all look alike. He experimented with alternatives, finally hitting on the idea of outlining his speech in a series of crude pencil sketches. The sketches did the job. A haystack with a snake under it told him where to start his story about his adventures in Nevada’s Carson Valley. An umbrella tilted against a stiff wind took him to the next part of his story, the fierce winds that blew down out of the Sierras at about two o’clock every afternoon. And so on.
It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability. This single fact— that our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape— is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefits is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.
In 2013, John McPhee published a piece in the New Yorker about writer’s block. Age eighty-two at the time, McPhee offered his remarks from the vantage of a high perch, atop an illustrious career that has earned him many awards and acknowledgment as a pioneer of the craft of creative nonfiction. Writer’s block is the seemingly insurmountable barrier one must somehow clamber over if he is to have any hope of engaging his subject. Writing, like any art form, is an iterative process of creation and discovery. Many would-be writers fail to find their voices for the simple fact that, until they are clear about what they want to say, they cannot bring themselves to dive in. McPhee’s solution to this problem? He writes a letter to his mother. He tells her how miserable he feels, what hopes he’d had for the subject about which he wants to write (a bear), but that he has no idea how to go about it and, really, it seems that he’s not cut out to be a writer after all. He would like to put across the sheer size of the bear, and how utterly lazy it is, preferring to sleep fifteen hours a day, and so on. “And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”
McPhee’s first draft is an “awful blurting.” “Then you put the thing aside. You get in the car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version— if it did not exist— you obviously would not be thinking of ways to improve it. In short, you may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day— yes, while you sleep— but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”
This is the crux: Learning works the same way as McPhee’s “awful blurting.” Your grasp of unfamiliar material often starts out feeling clumsy and approximate. But once you engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, the mind begins to “knit” at the problem on its own. You don’t engage the mind by reading a text over and over again or by passively watching PowerPoint slides. You engage it by making the effort to explain the material yourself, in your own words— connecting the facts, making it vivid, relating it to what you already know. Learning, like writing, is an act of engagement. Struggling with the puzzle stirs your creative juices, sets the mind to looking for parallels and metaphors from elsewhere in your experience, knowledge that can be transferred and applied here. It makes you hungry for the solution. And the solution, when you arrive at it, becomes more deeply embedded with your prior knowledge and abilities than anything pasted onto the surface of your brain by PowerPoint. So take a page from McPhee: when you want to master something new, delete the whimpering and go wrestle the bear.
In particular, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these:
Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration.
Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems.
Bloom’s taxonomy classifies cognitive learning on six levels. It was developed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by psychologist Benjamin Bloom. The six levels range from gaining knowledge (the most fundamental level) to developing comprehension of the underlying facts and ideas, being able to apply learning to solve problems, being able to analyze ideas and relationships so as to make inferences, being able to synthesize knowledge and ideas in new ways, and, at the most sophisticated level, being able to use learning to evaluate opinions and ideas and make judgments based on evidence and objective criteria.
Every five minutes or so I throw out a question on the material we just talked about, and I can see them start to look through their notes. I say, “Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it’s going to be easier to find it. But as soon as you get your notes out, you have short-circuited the path. You are not exploring for the path anymore, someone has told you the way.
At other times, Wenderoth will pose a question to the class and ask them to think about it. She has students write three possible answers on the whiteboard up front and then vote on which answer they think is correct by raising the number of fingers that corresponds with the answer on the board. She’ll instruct students to find somebody with fingers “different from yours and talk to them and figure out who has the correct answer.”
In fact, as stunning as it sounds, Matthews will tell a student, “If you’ve read every word of this chapter, you’re not being very efficient.” The point is not to “slide your eyes over the words.” You start with questions, and you read for answers.
McDermott sets the ground rules very clearly at the start of the term. She lays out the research on learning and the testing effect and explains why the quizzes are helpful, even if they don’t feel helpful.
In the six years since Jiffy Lube University was launched, it has received many accolades from the training profession and earned accreditation by the American Council on Education. Employees who progress through training in all job certifications can enroll at a postsecondary institution with seven hours of college credit under their belts. Since the program’s beginning, employee turnover has dropped and customer satisfaction has increased.
I'm James—an engineer based in New Zealand—and I have a crippling addiction to new ideas. If you're an enabler, send me a book recommendation through one of the channels below.
