Empirical Evidence versus Theory, Lore, and Intuition
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, Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Here is an excerpt from the book.
Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on learning theories that have been handed down to us, and these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibility drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches, students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what works and to discover the strategies that get results.
Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think. Many others have their hands in the puzzle of learning as well. Developmental and educational psychologists are concerned with theories of human development and how they can be used to shape the tools of education — such as testing regimes, instructional organizers (for example topic outlines and schematic illustrations), and resources for special groups like those in remedial and gifted education. Neuroscientists, using new imaging techniques and other tools, are advancing our understanding of brain mechanisms that underlie learning, but we’re still a very long way from knowing what neuroscience will tell us about how to improve education.
How is one to know whose advice to take on how best to go about learning?
It’s wise to be skeptical. Advice is easy to find, only a few mouse-clicks away. Yet not all advice is grounded in research — far from it. Nor does all that passes as research meet the standards of science, such as having appropriate control conditions to assure that the results of an investigation are objective and generalizable. The best empirical studies are experimental in nature: the researcher develops a hypothesis and then tests it through a set of experiments that must meet rigorous criteria for design and objectivity. In the chapters that follow, we have distilled the findings of a large body of such studies that have stood up under review by the scientific community be- fore being published in professional journals. We are collaborators in some of these studies, but not the lion’s share. Where we’re offering theory rather than scientifically validated results, we say so. To make our points we use, in addition to tested science, anecdotes from people like Matt Brown whose work requires mastery of complex knowledge and skills, stories that illustrate the underlying principles of how we learn and remember. Discussion of the research studies themselves is kept to a minimum, but you will find many of them cited in the notes at the end of the book if you care to dig further.
People Misunderstand Learning
It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teachers and students isn’t serving us well, but some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference. People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times — say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class — you can burn it into memory. Not so. Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer. It’s widely believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the most effective way to master a new skill is to give it dogged, single-minded focus, practicing over and over until you’ve got it down. Our faith in this runs deep, because most of us see fast gains during the learning phase of massed practice. What’s apparent from the research is that gains achieved during massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly.
The finding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one study strategy of most people — including more than 80 percent of college students in some surveys — and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning. Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no measure of mastery.
You needn’t look far to find training systems that lean heavily on the conviction that mere exposure leads to learning. Consider Matt Brown, the pilot. When Matt was ready to advance from piston planes, he had a whole new body of knowledge to master in order to get certified for the business jet he was hired to pilot. We asked him to describe this process. His employer sent him to eighteen days of training, ten hours a day, in what Matt called the “ fire hose” method of instruction. The first seven days straight were spent in the classroom being instructed in all the plane’s systems: electrical, fuel, pneumatics, and so on, how these systems operated and interacted, and all their fail-safe tolerances like pressures, weights, temperatures, and speeds. Matt is required to have at his immediate command about eighty different “memory action items” — actions to take without hesitation or thought in order to stabilize the plane the moment any one of a dozen or so unexpected events occur. It might be a sudden decompression, a thrust reverser coming unlocked in ight, an engine failure, an electrical fire. Matt and his fellow pilots gazed for hours at mind- numbing PowerPoint illustrations of their airplane’s principal systems. Then something interesting happened.
“About the middle of day ve,” Matt said, “they ash a schematic of the fuel system on the screen, with its pressure sensors, shutoff valves, ejector pumps, bypass lines, and on and on, and you’re struggling to stay focused. Then this one instructor asks us, ‘Has anybody here had the fuel lter by- pass light go on in ight?’ This pilot across the room raises his hand. So the instructor says, ‘Tell us what happened,’ and sud- denly you’re thinking, Whoa, what if that was me?
“So, this guy was at 33,000 feet or something and he’s about to lose both engines because he got fuel without anti- freeze in it and his lters are clogging with ice. You hear that story and, believe me, that schematic comes to life and sticks with you. Jet fuel can commonly have a little water in it, and when it gets cold at high altitude, the water will condense out, and it can freeze and block the line. So whenever you refuel, you make good and sure to look for a sign on the fuel truck saying the fuel has Prist in it, which is an antifreeze. And if you ever see that light go on in fight, you’re going to get yourself down to some warmer air in a hurry.” Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
Then the nature of Matt’s instruction shifted. The next eleven days were spent in a mix of classroom and flight simulator training. Here, Matt described the kind of active engagement that leads to durable learning, as the pilots had to grapple with their aircraft to demonstrate mastery of standard operating procedures, respond to unexpected situations, and drill on the rhythm and physical memory of the movements that are required in the cockpit for dealing with them. A flight simulator provides retrieval practice, and the practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied and involves as far as possible the same mental processes Matt will invoke when he’s at altitude. In a simulator, the abstract is made concrete and personal. A simulator is also a series of tests, in that it helps Matt and his instructors calibrate their judgment of where he needs to focus to bring up his mastery.
