Helping Students ‘Make It Stick’
I’ve had the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel on my bookshelf for almost 2 years, and I’m just now making a dent in it (I swear I’ll finish it over winter break!).
Before I get too far into it, though, I wanted to note a few helpful insights that would be simple and valuable to students and teachers– especially since final exams are right around the corner.
Here they are:
- Making mistakes and correcting those mistakes while learning is valuable and leads to increased retention.
- You need to make abstract ideas concrete in order to learn effectively.
- To remember information longer, try retrieving the content with practice quizzes (you and a study group of fellow classmates can give these to each other to prepare for the real deal).
- Underlining, highlighting and cramming are not the best ways to retain and learn information. A different approach that is more effective is leaving time before study sessions to let the information sink in, and tie that new knowledge to old knowledge you may have (this works well especially with psychology and communication classes); find a way to make old knowledge and/or personal experiences relate to the new information for improved learning.
I’ve only just scratched the surface of the various principles in Make It Stick (sorry, students, I won’t be able to share more learning tricks until finals have long been over).
However, I hope this small bit of information comes in handy for both teachers and students this time of year. If you’d love to have all the secrets to successful learning right this moment, check out the book Make It Stick for yourself.
Happy teaching, learning, and testing!