As an educator and passionate learner, it is really important to me to deeply understand learning, what it is, and how to do it more and more effectively.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown kept sticking out to me as I browsed audio books through the Audible app on my smart phone. I am on a very serious study plan, which is to read whatever books that strike my fancy or curiosity. Having finished reading the audio book, I've found a few very valuable things in the books which have really helped me learn more effectively, which in my case pertains mostly to, but is not limited to, language learning. Currently I'm learning Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean, because I've lived in Korea, Mainland China, and as of October 15th, 2019 which is today's date, I should be moving to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia very soon and I want to understand and be able to communicate effectively with Saudi's when I arrive, or at least get an Arabic linguistic head start on those goals, even if it turns out Modern Standard Arabic isn't really what they use to communicate there.
I've learned to plan learning large bodies of knowledge which require proficiency as far ahead of time as possible, as least 63 days, 21 days, or 7 days, because it takes 63 days to automatize, 21 days to habituate, and 7 days for new data to travel from short-term to long-term memory.
Make It Stick taught me about interleaving, which is when someone practices with a certain degree of randomness the things they want to remember and, importantly, begin to master. I am not interested in short term gains but then losing that supposedly gained knowledge because it was only in short term memory. I want to keep what I practice and learn and study.
Peter Brown and the other authors give an example of interleaving through a study where one group of batters were given 15 pitches in a certain kind of pitch in set of several different types of pitches, perhaps for instance the fast ball, the curve ball, etc. This type of practice/learning is titled Massed Practice because it is a lot of focus on a single object of learning, and is also the kind of learning most people practice because it appears to give the practitioner the most rapid gains. However, the authors make the point that rapid gains, according to the evidence, are those that are also fail to stick in the long run.
The other group of batters was given all the same types of pitches, but instead of being given them in groups of 15 of the same type, they were pitched those pitches randomly.
The results were that, even though it appeared initially that the 15 pitches group mastered the ability to successfully bat those pitches more rapidly during the 15 pitches portion of the practice and learning, and it took much longer for the random pitches group to learn to read and successfully bat the pitches being throw to them, when switching to random pitches for both groups the 15 pitches group performed more poorly than the random pitches group, and the random pitches groups achieved a higher level of mastery.
When the group of batters took different kinds of pitches for the duration of their practice/learning time, which caused them to take longer to understand and grasp the multiple different types of pitches being thrown to them, in contrast to the Massed Practice of the 15 pitch group which practiced each type of pitch one at a time, they were using the practice/learning principle called Interleaving. Practicing the knowledge the batters presumably wanted to acquire by using a multi-focus practice pattern enabled those batters to, although it did not appear so, to master batting each of those distinct pitches as shown by their success in later batting them, which the authors pointed out is a procedural knowledge skill taking mere fractions of a second to gather and execute on several different data points.
I have begun practicing interleaving my foreign language practice by jumping between different topics of language focus, for instance making sentences with countries, making sentences that describe, and making, or more accurately translating, common phrases from my mother language into my target language. I also practice interleaving, not only between different language topics in the main language I'm practicing right now, Arabic, but also interleaving by mixing the languages I practice in a practice session. So, I may practice a lesson of Arabic, then a lesson of Mandarin Chinese, then back to Arabic, then to Korean, then back to Arabic. This has drastically reduced the level of boredom I was feeling when using massed practice by focusing on one language topic in one target language at a time. In addition, I feel far more excited to learn because I know it helps my language learning to practice, notwithstanding time limits, to practice the languages I want to automatize by practicing all of them, as long as I do practice them in the rotation of that practice session.
Another practice I learned from Making It Stick is by recalling and speaking out (in the context of language learning) a phrase or word that is not really in my short term memory, from my long term memory. Make It Stick taught me that recalling a piece of information from my long term memory, a piece of information that has slipped from my short term memory and that takes some effort to bring back up from the depths of my apparently subconscious mind/memory into the realm of production or, to put it linguistically, output, makes it stick longer in my memory and/or subconscious mind.
Also related in this practice is that the greater the difficulty in remembering, the greater the level of stickiness. This means that if it takes me more than a moment, and even a few moments or more than that to recall some piece of information, that is okay or even preferable because it means that piece of information that I took great effort to recall will be more accessible later. Now, therefore, when I encounter this situation with something I'm trying to remember, I don't feel discouraged because I know this step is contributing to my learning and making it much easier for me to remember and use it later when time is of the essence.
Even as I'm writing this essay, I'm putting these principles into work and therefore making it easier to recall the information from Make It Stick later when I want to use it, either in my personal learning or teaching or both, since writing is often an act of drawing from subconscious and long-term memory, which then gives me data access point for associated knowledge.
I'm excited to learn about these empirically supported learning habits because for many years I have been dancing around them without having the precise language to name them and more precisely use them. I'm really relieved and happy to be moving beyond massed practice which up until this point I thought was effective, but still somehow had the impression that it wasn't helping me. Now I understand more deeply how to learn which goes some distance to alleviate my hopelessness and discouragement about language learning in which my success has been little more than spotty or perhaps not with the effectiveness and purpose and precision that I have been wanting. Now I have hope about my learning process, and Make It Stick helped me get here. Praise God.
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Find my books at levijohnson.net
- Intelligence: Your Escape from Ignorance
- Abundance: Your Path Out of Poverty
