Make It Stick

Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, Mark A. McDaniel

Psychology

Print length: 329 pagesHarvard University Press, 2014

Description

Why do familiar study habits often feel effective while producing weak long-term learning? Drawing on cognitive psychology and related research, Make It Stick argues that rereading, highlighting, cramming, and repetitive practice can create temporary fluency without durable mastery. In their place, the authors explain methods that make recall more effortful and reliable: self-testing, spaced review, varied practice, and interleaving different kinds of problems. Examples and practical guidance connect these principles to classrooms, professional training, athletics, and independent study. Written for students, teachers, trainers, and lifelong learners, the book reframes productive difficulty as a feature of learning and shows how practice can be designed to strengthen memory, transfer, and future performance.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Journalistic · Technical

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Cerebral · Earnest · Hopeful

Structure

Argumentative

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthTransformationWork

About Peter C. Brown

Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist whose background in management consulting informs his practical approach to nonfiction. In Make It Stick, coauthored with cognitive psychologists Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, he serves as a narrative bridge between experimental research and everyday learning. Brown translates findings about memory into clear accounts of people learning in demanding settings, pairing scientific explanation with consequential examples. His distinctive contribution is this combination of a novelist’s storytelling instincts and a former consultant’s concern with how ideas work in practice.

About Henry L. Roediger

Henry L. Roediger writes about how psychological knowledge is made and how it can be put to use, moving between research instruction and accessible accounts of learning. Roediger’s books favor a cumulative explanatory structure: define a problem, show how evidence bears on it, and limit conclusions to what the evidence supports. Make It Stick applies that method to study habits, using cognitive research and practical examples to explain why self-testing, spacing, and varied practice improve durable learning. The methods textbooks proceed from hypotheses and variables through measurement, analysis, and replication, making abstract principles concrete while teaching readers to scrutinize published claims as carefully as they design new studies.

About Mark A. McDaniel

Mark A. McDaniel is a cognitive psychologist whose research and books examine how memory succeeds, why learning fails, and how experimental findings can improve ordinary practice. A professor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis, he has worked on encoding, retrieval, concept learning, prospective memory, educational applications, and the effects of aging. His method tests familiar behavior rather than accepting intuition about what works. Research comparing a single reading with repeated reading, for example, helped expose the difference between immediate fluency and durable learning. In Make It Stick, coauthored with Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, that distinction becomes a practical account of retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, generation, and productive difficulty. Brown supplied the narrative voice, while McDaniel and Roediger contributed cognitive-science expertise. McDaniel’s work on prospective memory similarly moves between controlled studies and daily tasks, examining how intentions return through active monitoring or environmental cues. Memory Fitness applies the same evidence-testing approach to aging, external aids, exercise, drugs, supplements, and demanding mnemonic systems.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9780674419377

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