Make It Stick
To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testin
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Two cognitive scientists and a novelist team up to show what the research says about effective learning: testing yourself, spacing study, mixing topics, and embracing the slow, harder feeling that signals real progress.
Make It Stick distills cognitive science research on learning into practical strategies for students and teachers. Key principles include retrieval practice, spaced repetition, interleaved learning, and resisting the illusion of mastery from rereading.
Yes. The book draws on peer-reviewed cognitive science research, particularly the work of Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, two of the authors. The principles are widely endorsed in education research.
Make It Stick was written by Peter C. Brown, published in 2014 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Make It Stick is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Make It Stick takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Make It Stick is a standalone novel by Peter C. Brown, not part of a series.
Make It Stick is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
