Make it Stick (Book Review)
This is a book about education and learning and how to increase your learning and how to actually make what you’re learning stick. I thought this was a really interesting book that anyone with an interest in teaching or learning will benefit from reading this work.
The premise of this book is that a lot of the ways that we study and that we learn are not very good and they’re not very effective. What most people do is they reread text multiple times, they highlight or they take notes and that’s all that they do. One of the big things that authors said was they have actually done studies and have empirical evidence to prove that the above-mentioned strategies are not the best way to study. Moreover, the best way to retain information is instead read the text but then quiz yourself, so you actually learn by testing (Actually when you’re coding, you really learn how your function works after testing not just rereading it).
When you know something difficult to learn, it results in greater retention over time. This was pretty interesting to me, I’m a person that has spent a lot of time learning, teaching myself but I didn’t realize how little that it’s just one repetition but the objective is still the retention of things. So, what happens if you ask yourself about what you read instead of reading the text again? It’s better. What is the most effective way to increase retention? It’s testing, quizzing yourself that could increase its duration because it implanted in your mind. That’s the reason why watching a video or reading a book (even a lot of times) about programming doesn’t become a programmer because everything is about practice. For example, If you read an article about how to run faster, that’s not becoming you a faster runner, practicing this way of how to run faster, it will do.
The book also talks about the idea of using interleaving. I would summarize that if you’re trying to learn something instead of repeating a drill multiple times until master it, it’s better if you break that up and you focus one assignment at time (like divide and conquer) but with a random pattern (take one task, then another, go back to the previous activity and so on). One example of this are the flashcards where you don’t study just one particular thing and try to memorize it, instead you go through and you’re constantly testing yourself. Also, you’re constantly alternating between different things that you’re trying to learn and when you alternate and repeat enough, you end up having a greater durability in what you learned.
Another cool thing about the book is the use of mnemonics. It’s basically increasing your memory by using different tricks from memory. Sometimes you might use a memory fortress. We are better at spatial and visual memorization and it could be easy to put things in different places and imagine that each area represents a certain thing. In summary, associate what you are learning with the different situations.
The final part of the book talked about how to actually teach and how to apply this yourself like someone who’s studying or trying to learn something. It’s interesting that the book is structured in the same way of teaching that it is recommending for making things stick.
