We resisted the temptation to become overtly prescriptive in the preceding chapters, but early readers urged us to get specific with practical advice. So we did.

Learning Tips for Students

Embrace the fact that significant learning is often difficult, and that setbacks are signs of effort, not failure. Effortful learning changes your brain, building expertise and increasing your capability.

Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory

When you read a text or study lecture notes, ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text, to help you remember the key ideas.

Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course.

Use quizzing to identify weak mastery areas and focus your studying to make them strong.

Most studiers focus on underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides, but self-quizzing is far more potent for learning than additional rereading.

Rereading creates illusions of knowing, but quizzing yourself on the main ideas and the meanings behind the terms helps you focus on the central precepts and arrests forgetting. Quizzing strengthens your learning of new knowledge and skills and helps you recall it in the future.

Self-quizzing feels awkward and frustrating, but it strengthens your memory, and you learn more if you restudy something after failing to recall it.

Space Out Your Retrieval Practice

Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions. Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions, and quiz yourself on new material once a month.

If you use flashcards, keep quizzing yourself on the cards you answer correctly, and set them aside to revisit periodically. Interleave the study of two or more topics to ensure that you continually refresh your memory.

Intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to single-minded, repetitive practice of something we want to master, but we fail to see how quickly the gains made during single-minded repetitive practice fade, leaving us with the impression that massed practice is productive.

If you space out your practice sessions and use self- quizzing as your primary study strategy, you will have to work harder to reconstruct what you already studied, which makes the important ideas more salient and memorable.

Massed practice feels more productive than spaced practice, but it is not. Spaced practice helps you to reconstruct learning from long-term memory.

Interleave the Study of Different Problem Types

Many textbooks are structured in study blocks that supply many examples to solve before moving on to another kind of problem. Interleaved practice is more effective.

Once you understand a problem type, scatter the problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you can quiz yourself on each.

A baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fastballs, curveballs, and changeups will perform better in practice than a player who mixes it up.

Most learners focus on many examples of one problem type at a time, but mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and apply the correct solution.

When you practice one type of problem before moving on to another type, it feels like you're getting better mastery, but this feeling is illusory.

Other Effective Study Strategies

Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material. Examples include relating the material to what you already know and explaining it to somebody else.

When studying physics, you can better grasp the principles of angular momentum by visualizing a figure skater's rotation speeding up as her arms are drawn into her body. When studying heat transfer, you can better understand conduction by imagining warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa.

Mary Pat Wenderoth encourages her students to elaborate by assigning them the task of creating large "summary sheets", which show graphically and through key words how the various biological systems interrelate with each other.

GENERATION is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution. It improves learning and memory of a text.

Many people perceive their learning to be most effective when it is experiential, and this is a form of generation. Bonnie Blodgett provides a strong example of generative learning in Chapter 4.

When reading new class material, you can practice generation by explaining beforehand the key ideas you expect to find and how they relate to your prior knowledge.

If you're in a science or math course, try to solve the problems before you get to class. The professors understand that it makes classroom learning stronger.

Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what you have learned and asking yourself questions. It adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.

The biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth assigns weekly low- stakes "learning paragraphs" in which students reflect on what they learned the previous week.

Calibration is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don't know with objective feedback so that you can avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery.

Airline pilots use flight instruments to know when their perceptual systems are misleading them about critical factors like whether the airplane is fl ying level. Students use quizzes and practice tests to see whether they know as much as they think they do.

Mnemonic devices are tools for remembering things. They help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory, and they are used by psychology students at Bellerbys College in Oxford.

Michael Young, Medical Student

Young entered medical school without the usual foundation of premed coursework. He barely eked out a 65 on his fi rst exam, so he started reading empirical studies on learning and became deeply interested in the testing effect.

Young earned a master's degree in psychology, worked as a drug addiction counselor, and wondered if he would be happier in medicine. He cobbled together some courses from his local university, and took the Medical College Admission Test and managed to score well enough to get into medical school.

When he found himself very far indeed from being over the hump, he became more mindful of that when he studied, and went back and checked if he was way off base or on the right track. The retrieval practice was not a natural fi t for him, but he made himself stick to it long enough to see if it worked. It ended up working out really well for him.

Young spoke with us about how he adapted the principles of spaced retrieval practice to medical school.

When you go back and review, make sure you can recall the learning. If not, go back and look at it again.

On finding the right spacing for practice, the author says that the longer you wait to practice retrieval, the better it is for memory, but you have to be successful when you try to recall it.

Young has slowed down the speed at which he reads material, thinking about meaning and using elaboration to better understand it and lodge it in memory.

Young's impressive per for mance has not been lost on his professors or his peers, and he has been invited to tutor struggling students, an honor few are given.

Stephen Madigan, a professor at the University of Southern California, noticed Timothy Fellows was getting 90 to 95 percent on all his exams, papers, short- answer questions, multiple- choice questions. He asked Fellows about his study habits.

Madigan did not know Fellows outside of class, but he observed that he had a life beyond his academics. Fellows' study habits are still shared with incoming students.

The student always does the reading prior to a lecture, anticipates test questions, answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures, reviews study guides, relearns terms, and copies bolded terms into a reading notebook.

Tips for Lifelong Learners

The strategies for learning we have just outlined are effective for anyone at any age, and are centered around classroom instruction. Lifelong learners use the same principles in a variety of less-structured settings.

Retrieval Practice

Nathaniel Fuller, a professional actor with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, highlights all of his lines in a binder before starting to learn a new script. This makes it easy to find the lines and gives him a sense of the construction of the lines.

Fuller uses retrieval practice in various forms, including covering a page of the script and silently rendering the lines of the characters he's playing opposite. He checks his accuracy and goes on.

Half of knowing your part is knowing when to say it, and trying your best to remember it without looking at it.

"I work like crazy, and then quit when it feels like diminishing returns. Then I come back the next day and won't remember it."

As he progresses through the script, he practices from familiar pages and scenes into newer material, stitching less familiar material to more familiar, deepening his mastery of the role as a whole.

Fuller learns lines by examining the language of the script, the textures of the words, and the fi gures of speech for how they reveal meaning. This helps him develop an emotional approach to the role.

Fuller now speaks every line of the other actors into a palm-sized digital recorder, and uses his thumb to control the recorder. He speaks his lines from memory, checking the script as he goes.

Fuller practices at home, imagining his living room as the stage, and observes the actors in rehearsal, adapting the imaginary stage within his living room to the now-established blocking.

Fuller's learning process is a seamless blend of desirable difficulties that make his characters come alive to himself and his audience.

Generation

John McPhee, age eighty-two at the time, published a piece in the New Yorker about writer's block. In the piece, he tells his mother how miserable he feels, how he wants to write about a bear, but has no idea how to go about it.

McPhee's fi rst draft is an "awful blurting", but he keeps working on it while driving home, and he thinks of better ways to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem.

Learning works the same way as McPhee's "awful blurting": you have to engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, by connecting the facts, making it vivid, relating it to what you already know.

Refl ection

In chapter 2 we tell how the Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold uses the habit of refl ection to improve his skills in the operating room. He devised a surgical solution for repairing a delicate sinus structure.

The power of refl ection as a learning technique is evident throughout the personal memoir Highest Duty, by Captain Chesley Sullenberger. Sullenberger used refl ection to improve his understanding of flight and the control of his aircraft through training, personal experience, and the close observation of others.

Elaboration

Thelma Hunter, who is eighty-eight, was learning four new works for an upcoming concert performance. She is not a prodigy or particularly renowned, but she is accomplished.

Hunter's methods include learning a new score physically, aurally, visually, and intellectually.

Hunter has made concessions to age, such as warming up before playing and thinking about the piece while driving. She visualizes the score and makes mental marginalia, and sometimes says it out loud, "Up an octave, at this point."

Hunter describes experiences that would seem to manifest Ericsson's theory that experts build libraries of mental models through thousands of hours of solo, deliberate practice. After having been away from the piece for a week, she will sit down and play it through using a fi ngering pattern that feels entirely natural.

Tips for Teachers

Here are some basic strategies that will help students become stronger learners in the classroom. We hope you will find practical ideas you can adapt and put to work.

Explain to Students How Learning Works

Students must be helped to understand the fundamental ideas about how people learn, so they can better manage their own education.

When learning is easy, it is often superfi cial and soon forgotten. When learning is effortful, the brain changes, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.

Create Desirable Diffi culties in the Classroom

When practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the pro cess of forgetting. Make the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself.

Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might include practice tests, writing exercises, and short statements that summarize recent material covered in a text or lecture.

Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, to strengthen conceptual learning and develop deeper understanding of relationships between ideas.

Be Transparent

Help your students understand the difficulties you have incorporated into your lessons, and why it's worth persisting.

University of Washington

Mary Pat Wenderoth helps students master their coursework by introducing desirable difficulties, helping them be effective at managing their own learning, and helping them rise to the levels of synthesis and evaluation.

Bloom's taxonomy classifies cognitive learning on six levels, from gaining knowledge to analyzing ideas and making inferences, and from synthesising knowledge and ideas to evaluating opinions and making judgments based on evidence and objective criteria.

Wenderoth teaches her students about the testing effect, the principle of desirable difficulties, and the perils of "illusions of knowing" and promises to make her instructional philosophy transparent.

Wenderoth poses questions to the class, and they vote on which answer they think is correct. They then talk to people with different answers to figure out who has the correct answer.

Wenderoth gives her students a new way to think about learning, and a new vocabulary for describing setbacks. When students blame the test, it's not a good meeting ground for solving problems.

Wenderoth has transformed class "study groups" into "testing groups", where everyone wrestles with a question together, without opening the textbook.

Wenderoth will ask students what ideas they don't feel really clear on, then send one student to the whiteboard to try to explain the concept.

Wenderoth assigns her students to sit with a blank piece of paper and write everything they can remember from class for ten minutes. They are then to go to their class notes and focus on the material they forgot.

Wenderoth's students create summary sheets every Monday, which are large cartoons dense with callouts, blowups, directional arrows, and the like. The sheets help them synthesize a week's information, thinking through how systems are connected.

Wenderoth will assign students to write low-stakes "learning paragraphs" on a Friday if she doesn't feel she's overburdening them, to stimulate retrieval and reflection, and to capture a week's learning before it is lost to the countless other concerns and diversions of college life.

Wenderoth has translated her class material into the different levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning, and has students identify where their answers fell on the taxonomy and think about what they need to know to respond at a higher level.

Poorly prepared students seldom survive entry-level science courses, and as a result, even students whose interests and aptitudes might lead them to successful science careers never get through the door.

Wenderoth and her colleagues have found that high-structure classes reduce student failure rates and increase exam results compared to low-structure classes. The high-structure classes also teach students the importance of having a "growth mindset" (that learning is hard work and that struggle increases intellectual abilities).

Wenderoth says he teaches students to think like professionals and show them how to get up again when they fall.

Michael D. Matthews, Psychology Professor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point

The pedagogical philosophy at West Point is founded on the Thayer method, which incorporates quizzing and recitation in every class meeting.

Students at West Point must focus on three pillars of training: academic, military, and physical. They must learn to zero in on what's essential and let the rest fall by the wayside.

Matthews's courses focus on constructs, not specifi c facts, and include daily quizzing and active problem solving with feedback. Students "take to the boards" to collaborate on answering higher-order questions, and one student is selected from each group to give a recitation to the class explaining how the group has answered the question.

West Point teaches you how to shoot an azimuth, a skill used for keeping your bearings in unfamiliar territory. Quizzing is a way of shooting an azimuth in the classroom.

Cadet Kiley Hunkler won a Rhodes Scholarship and will be attending Oxford University and Johns Hopkins Medical School. She created learning objectives for each major course block and took a practice test every three days to see how she was doing.

One of this book's authors attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, and found that the Thayer method worked well for students who were not prone to work hard on their own outside of class.

Kathleen McDermott, Psychology Professor, Washington University at St. Louis

Kathleen McDermott gives daily low- stakes quizzes in a university course on human learning and memory. The questions hit the high points of the lecture, the readings, or both, and students have to think in order to do well.

McDermott sets the ground rules very clearly at the start of the term and explains why the quizzes are helpful, even if they don't feel helpful. Students initially are not happy about the quiz regime, but by the end of the semester they say that the quizzes have helped them keep up with the course.

McDermott gives two midterm exams and a final, and uses quizzes to reinforce learning. He also gives cumulative exams, which reinforce learning by requiring students to engage in spaced review.

Columbia, Illinois, Public School District

We have worked with teachers in a middle school in Columbia, Illinois to test the effects of integrating low- stakes quizzing into the curriculum. The project has since been extended to high school history and science classes.

The Illinois State Board of Education has adopted new math and English language arts standards for K - 12 education in line with the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Columbia School District is redesigning its curriculum and its tests to be more rigorous and to engage students in more writing and analysis work.

In- Service Training

Licensed professionals in many fields must earn continuing education credits to keep their skills current and maintain their licenses. If you see yourself in this scenario, you might consider using the presentation materials to quiz yourself on the key ideas and scheduling follow-up emails to appear in your inbox every month or so.

A new commercial training platform called Qstream sends learners periodic quizzes via their mobile devices to strengthen learning through spaced retrieval practice. A similar platform called Osmosis uses crowdsourced practice questions and explanations.

Kathy Maixner, Business Coach

The Maixner Group, based in Portland, Oregon, helps companies grow by improving their sales tactics. One big company added $21 million to its annual revenue after hooking up with Maixner.

Maixner's coaching techniques line up with the learning principles described in this book. She helps clients discover the root causes of a problem, generate possible solutions, and play out the implications of different strategies before committing to one.

Maixner's experience working with clients in many different fields helps her see around corners, where the hazards lie, and introduces the difficulties that make the learning stronger.

Farmers Insurance

Corporate sales training can be complicated, but Farmers Insurance's new-agent training is an excellent example of interleaving the learning and practice of different but related topics so that each adds meaning to the other.

The company recruits upward of two thousand new agents annually, and they attend an intensive weeklong program of learning exercises.

Participants are given magazines, scissors, and marking pens to illustrate what being a successful Farmers agent would look like to them personally, five years down the road. The point is simple: work backward to set the metrics for where you need to be.

The learning unfolds through a series of exercises that require participants to recall what they have learned earlier.

When participants first arrive, they're assigned to a red, blue, or green group. The green group is instructed to ask others about their family, prior occupation, favorite forms of recreation, and what they enjoy most.

When talking about sales, a good way to learn about a prospective customer is to ask about their family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment.

Throughout the week, four principal training topics are repeatedly touched on, a point is made, and the exercises shift to related questions. Participants brainstorm how to generate five hundred new policies in a year through marketing and development.

Practice is a central learning strategy for sales agents. They practice how to respond to a sales lead and also learn about the products they're selling.

Given the limited resources new agents have to invest, how do agents determine which strategies will pay off? Most agents guess that a direct mail campaign will return 1 percent.

The Farmers Insurance acronym FORE helps agents discover needs that a lead has that the company's products can meet. Through generation, spaced practice, and interleaving of the essential core curriculum, new agents learn what they need to do, and how.

Jiffy Lube University, an integrated suite of educational courses under the felicitous name Jiffy Lube University, is helping the company's franchisees win customers, reduce employee turnover, broaden their ser vice offerings, and boost sales.

The rapid- oil- change business has had to adjust to changes in the marketplace and advances in technology.

Jiffy Lube University is a Web-based learning platform that certifies technicians as proficient. After scoring 80 percent or better on an exam, employees begin training on the job, practicing new skills by following a written guide that breaks each service activity into its component steps.

Jiffy Lube's e-learning and on-the-job training incorporate quizzing, feedback, and spaced and interleaved practice to provide an individualized learning plan and monitor progress against the company's completion schedule.

Ken Barber, manager of learning and development at Jiffy Lube International, is putting the finishing touches on a computer-based simulation game for company managers called "A Day in the Life of a Store Manager".

Jiffy Lube University has received many accolades from the training profession and earned accreditation by the American Council on Education. Employee turnover has dropped and customer satisfaction has increased since the program's beginning.

Andersen Windows and Doors

At Andersen Windows and Doors, a culture of continuous improvement turns learning on its head, with production workers teaching the managers how to make the plant more efficient.

The company's division called Renewal by Andersen produces replacement windows of all types and sizes. The production line is divided into three work cells, each with four work stations, and workers change jobs every two hours to minimize repetitive stress injuries and broaden cross-training.

Every job is performed to a written standard, and every new employee is trained following an instructional sequence of practice and feedback that Wynveen calls "tell - show - do - review".

Workers train the managers when they have an idea for improving productivity, and when a production line team doesn't meet its targets, the workers are asked to identify the problem and redesign the production process to solve it.

Wynveen recruited a team to engage in a Kaizen event to increase the productivity of the plant's double-hung window line by 40 percent and doubling production. The team met in a conference room eight hours a day for a week.

Wynveen asked production workers what changes were needed to make their plan work, and then the line was disassembled and rebuilt in two halves, over two weekends, restarted, and fine-tuned over subsequent months. The result was that the plant met its stretch goals and cut costs in half.

A learning culture empowers employees to change the system and solve problems, and makes learning an engine for continuous improvement.

Inner Gate Acu punc ture

Erik Isaacman, a thirty-something husband, father of two, and passionate practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, had a clinic that was succeeding in its therapeutic mission but struggling as a business.

Erik and Oliver Leonetti opened Inner Gate in 2005, and the business grew quickly. But they didn't have the systems in place to manage costs, and they didn't have clear goals or a management hierarchy.

Erik and Oliver's business coach Kathy Maixner helped them create the infrastructure they needed to grow their business: an operating manual, job descriptions, financial goals, metrics for measuring the performance of their clinicians.

Maixner used generation, reflection, elaboration, and rehearsal in her coaching sessions to help her partners become effective managers who delegate and empower their employees.

Erik's becoming an effective coach and teacher of his coworkers has helped put the clinic on sound footing. The new protocol helps clinicians clarify what brought the patient in and recommend a treatment plan.

We role-play as patient and clinician, raise questions, objections, and practice responding to the patient and the clinic. Then we listen to the differences.

Erik and Oliver have built a top-rated acupuncture clinic in Portland by dedicating themselves to being learners as well as teachers.

The techniques for highly effective learning outlined in this book can be put to use right now everywhere learners, teachers, and trainers are at work. They come at no cost, require no structural reform, and promise both real and long-lasting benefits.

TLDR