Make It Stick

spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related

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If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.

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Similarly, if they interleave the study of different topics, they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence.

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Thus we unabashedly cover key ideas more than once, repeating principles in different contexts across the book. The reader will remember them better and use them more effectively as a result.

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spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.

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Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.

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Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

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We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not.

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When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.

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Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes,

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Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.

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Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting.

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A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.

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Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.

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Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.

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People do have multiple forms of intelligence to bring to bear on learning, and you learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.

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This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice.

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Interleaving the identification of bird types or the works of oil painters improves your ability both to learn the unifying attributes within a type and to differentiate between types, improving your skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later.

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We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment of what we know and can do. Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned.

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In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.

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However, if you practice elaboration, there’s no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material

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meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

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The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

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Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning.

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People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery.

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Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. The need to understand that when learning is hard, you’re doing important work.

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Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

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Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.

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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.

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get yourself down to some warmer air in a hurry.”3 Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

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A flight simulator provides retrieval practice,

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While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying?

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Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked for examples outside the text? The answer was no in every case.

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The emphasis here is ours. We make it to drive home the point that students who don’t quiz themselves (and most do not) tend to overestimate how well they have mastered class material. Why?

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Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill.

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Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it. When Matt

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One of the most striking research findings is the power of active retrieval—testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit.

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One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak.

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Reflection Is a Form of Practice

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A lot of times something would come up in surgery that I had difficulty with, and then I’d go home that night thinking about what happened and what could I do, for example, to improve the way a suturing went.

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Or even if it wasn’t the next day, at least I’ve thought through this, and in so doing I’ve not only revisited things that I learned from lectures or from watching others performing surgery but also I’ve complemented that by adding something of my own to it that I missed during the teaching process.

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Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.

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To make sure the new learning is available when it’s needed, Ebersold points out, “you memorize the list of things that you need to worry about in a given situation: steps A, B, C, and D,” and you drill on them. Then there comes a time when you get into a tight situation and it’s no longer a matter of thinking through the steps, it’s a matter of reflexively taking the correct action. “Unless you keep recalling this maneuver, it will not become a reflex. Like a race car driver in a tight situation or a quarterback dodging a tackle, you’ve got to act out of reflex before you’ve even had time to think. Recalling it over and over, practicing it over and over. That’s just so important.” The Testing Effect A child stringing cranberries on a thread goes to hang them on the tree, only to find they’ve slipped off the other end. Without the knot, there’s no making a string. Without the knot there’s no necklace, there’s no beaded purse, no magnificent tapestry. Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast. Since as far back as 1885, psychologists have been

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a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of

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To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort.

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a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.

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While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results. Retrieval practice has been studied extensively in recent years, and an analysis of these studies shows that even a single test in a class can produce a large improvement in final exam scores, and gains in learning continue to increase as the number of tests increases.14

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Is repeated testing simply a way to expedite rote learning? In fact, research indicates that testing, compared to rereading, can facilitate better transfer of knowledge to new contexts and problems, and that it improves one’s ability to retain and retrieve material that is related but not tested.

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Students whose study strategies emphasize rereading but not self-testing show overconfidence in their mastery.

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Students who have been quizzed have a double advantage over those who have not: a more accurate sense of what they know and don’t know, and the strengthening of learning that accrues from retrieval practice.16

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But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort.

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You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces.

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Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice. Even in studies where the participants have shown superior results from spaced learning, they don’t perceive the improvement; they believe they learned better on the material where practice was massed.

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You develop a broader understanding of the relationships between different conditions and the movements required to succeed in them;

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you discern context better and develop a more flexible

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But this is the way life usually unfolds: problems and opportunities come at us unpredictably, out of sequence. For our learning to have practical value, we must be adept at discerning “What kind of problem is this?” so we can select and apply an appropriate solution.

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The power of interleaving practice to improve discriminability has been reaffirmed in studies of people learning bird classification.

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Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.

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“The reason variety is important is it helps us see more nuances in the things that we can compare against,”

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First—and this may seem self-evident: you do better on a test to demonstrate your competency at seeing patients in a clinic if your learning experience has involved seeing patients in a clinic. Simply reading about patients is not enough. However, on written final exams, medical students who have examined patients and those who have learned via written tests do equally well. The reason is that in a written test the student is being given considerable structure and being asked for specific information.

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In other words, the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you’ll be doing with the knowledge later.

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It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

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“practice like you play and you will play like you practice.”

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Book learning is not enough in these cases; actual hands-on practice is needed.

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Second, while it is important for a medical student to build breadth by seeing a wide variety of patients manifesting different

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diseases, placing too much emphasis on variety runs the risk of underemphasizing repeated retrieval practice on the basics—on the typical way the disease presents itself in most patients.

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“There’s a certain set of diseases that we want you to know very well,” Larsen says. “So we’re going to have you see these standardized patients again and again, and assess your performance until you really have that down and can show us,

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‘I really do that well.’ It’s not either/or, variety versus repetition.

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We need to make sure we’re appropriately balanced, and also recognize that we sometimes fall into the trap of familiarity.

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But really, repeated retrieval practice is crucial to long-term retention, and it’s a critical aspect of training.”

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a natural cycle of spaced retrieval practice, interleaving, and variety.

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We have lots of experiences we don’t learn from. What differentiates those that teach us something?”

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One form of practice that helps us learn from experience, as the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold recounted in Chapter 2, is reflection.

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Some people are more given to the act of reflection than others, so Doug Larsen has broadened his research to study how you might structure reflection as an integral part of the training, helping students cultivate it as a habit.

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He is experimenting with requiring students to write daily or weekly summaries of what they did, how it worked, and what they might do differently next time to get better results.

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He speculates that daily reflection, as a form of spaced retrieval practice, is probably just as critical in the real-world application of medicine as quizzing and testing are in building competencies in medical school.

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“The reason variety is important is it helps us see more nuances in the things that we can compare against,

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In that short period there’s a lot to learn: studying the opposition’s type of game in the classroom, discussing offensive and defensive strategies for opposing it, taking the discussion onto the playing field, breaking the strategies down to the movements of individual positions and trying them out, knitting the parts into a whole, and then repeating the moves until they run like clockwork.

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(1) you have to keep practicing the fundamentals from time to time, forever, so you keep them sharp, otherwise you’re cooked, but (2) you need to change it up in practice because too much repetition is boring. The position coaches work with players individually on specific skills and then on how they’re playing their positions during team practice.

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“practice like you play and you will play like you practice.

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These parts are gradually brought together and run as a team. Play is speeded up and slowed down, rehearsed mentally as well as physically. By

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But really, repeated retrieval practice is crucial to long-term retention, and it’s a critical aspect of training.

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We have lots of experiences we don’t learn from. What differentiates those that teach us something?

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We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through single-minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs are validated time and again by the visible improvement that comes during “practice-practice-practice.” But scientists call this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.”

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Cramming, a form of massed practice, has been likened to binge-and-purge eating. A lot goes in, but most of it comes right back out in short order. The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.

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How big an interval, you ask? The simple answer: enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition.

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At a minimum, enough time so that a little forgetting has set in.

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A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in

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The time periods between sessions of practice let memories consolidate. Sleep seems to play a large role in memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.

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The German scientist Sebastian Leitner developed his own system for spaced practice of flashcards, known as the Leitner box.

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Beware of the familiarity trap:

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This familiarity can hurt you during self-quizzing if you take shortcuts.

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Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing.

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In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete.

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The athlete gets frustrated because the learning’s not proceeding quickly, but the next week he will be better at all aspects, the skating, the stick handling, and so on, than if he’d dedicated each session to polishing one skill.

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Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit.

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It would be like always practicing flashcards in the same order. You need to shuffle your flashcards.

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If you always practice the same skill in the same way, from the same place on the ice or field, in the same set of math problems, or during the same sequence in a flight simulator, you’re starving your learning on short rations of variety.

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Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives.

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One difference, perhaps, between those who do and don’t is whether they have cultivated the habit of reflection. Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).

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As Doug Larsen reminds us, the connections between the neurons in the brain are very plastic. “Making the brain work is actually what seems to make a difference—bringing in more complex networks, then using those circuits repeatedly, which makes

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We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through single-minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs are validated time and again by the visible improvement that comes during “practice-practice-practice.” But scientists call this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.

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You are not allowed to carry a notebook and write notes. You listen, watch, rehearse, and execute.

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Jump school is a place where testing is the principal instructional medium, and the test is in the doing. And, like all things military, jump school adheres to a strict protocol. Get it right or get the boot.

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Then you try it: you practice falling along different planes of the body, you get corrective feedback, and you practice it again.

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The test becomes more difficult.

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Had it frightened her? Not at all, she said. Mia was prepared to handle it, and her confidence gave her the cool to “just sort of swim out.”

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It’s one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery.

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Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do.

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When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it. Facing the jump door may always reawaken feelings of terror, but the moment she’s out, Mia says, the fear evaporates.

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In consolidation, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces.

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New learning is labile: its meaning is not fully formed and therefore is easily

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Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation.

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Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with us.

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The mental rehearsal you conduct while lying in your bunk too tired to sleep and wishing the next day was already over and well-jumped is a form of spaced practice, and that helps you, too.

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There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know.

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In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.

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Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.

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determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it

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New learning is labile: its meaning is not fully formed and therefore is easily altered.

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the easier knowledge or a skill is for you to retrieve, the less your retrieval practice will benefit your retention of it.

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First, that some difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains—like spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice—will

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feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring. Second, that our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.

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determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth.

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Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material.

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It also multiplies the cues for retrieving the knowledge,

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How do humans learn concepts, for example the difference between dogs and cats?

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As was true for the baseball players’ batting practice, interleaving produced difficulty in retrieving past examples of a particular species, which further solidified the learning of which birds are representative of a particular species.

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The retrieval difficulties posed by spacing, interleaving, and variation are overcome

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transfer of learning, which is the ability to apply what you’ve learned in new settings.

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“practice like you play, and you’ll play like you practice,”

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First, that some difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains—like spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice

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will feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring. Second, that our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.

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The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation

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In testing, being required to supply an answer rather than select from multiple choice options often provides stronger learning benefits.

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Having to write a short essay makes them stronger still.

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Overcoming these mild difficulties is a form of active learning, where students engage in higher-order thinking tasks rather than passively receiving knowledge conferred by others.

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Wrestling with the question, you rack your brain for something that might give you an idea.

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Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer

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It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.

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The act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as reflection

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One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.”

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we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material.

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The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it’s the errors that they will learn.

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“practice like you play, and you’ll play like you practice,

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The kids who had been taught that errors are a natural part of learning showed significantly better use of working memory than did the others.

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The results support the finding that difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”

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Dweck’s work shows that people who believe that their intellectual ability is fixed from birth, wired in their genes, tend to avoid challenges at which they may not succeed, because failure would appear to be an indication of lesser native ability.

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By contrast, people who are helped to understand that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control, are more likely to tackle difficult challenges and persist at them.

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It doesn’t require a great conceptual leap to get from Paris’s “Festival of Errors” to San Francisco’s “FailCon,” where technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists meet once a year to study failures that gave them critical insights they needed in order to pivot in their business strategies so as to succeed.

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Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot.

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The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different

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It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.14

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“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

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As we said earlier, the process of trying to solve a problem without the benefit of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling

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One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn.

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Her “learning style” might be called leap-before-you-look-because-if-you-look-first-you-probably-won’t-like-what-you-see.

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“Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have figured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into. For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.”

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Bonnie’s success shows how struggling with a problem makes for strong learning, and how a sustained commitment to advancing in a particular field of endeavor through trial-and-error effort leads to complex mastery and greater knowledge of the interrelationships of things.

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“The experience of creating beauty calms me down,” she says, but it’s strictly a discovery

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In calling herself the Blundering Gardener, she is giving herself and us, her readers, permission to make mistakes and get on with

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Note that in writing about her experiences, Bonnie is engaging two potent learning processes beyond the act of gardening itself. She is retrieving the details and the story of what she has discovered—say, about an experiment in grafting two species of fruit trees—and then she is elaborating by explaining the experience to her readers, connecting the outcome to what she already knows about the subject or has learned as a result.

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The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it’s the errors that they will learn.16

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What she relished were pictures that gave her ideas and passages of text where the designers used phrases like “my process” in describing how they had achieved the desired effect.

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It was the possessive pronoun, my process, that affirmed Bonnie in her headlong rush to learn by doing.

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The results support the finding that difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”17

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“Look, blundering’s really not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that you get stuff done. A lot of people, when they contemplate the enormity of the task and they see all that’s entailed, they’re stopped in their tracks.”

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Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, who coined the phrase “desirable difficulties,” write that difficulties are desirable because “they trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering.

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The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches.

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“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

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“Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have figured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into. For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.”18

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“The experience of creating beauty calms me down,” she says, but it’s strictly a discovery process.

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When practice conditions are varied or retrieval is interleaved with the practice of other material, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction and the versatility with which we can apply the learning in new settings at a later

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Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.

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performance. We’re constantly making judgments about what we know and don’t know and whether we’re capable of handling a task or solving a problem.

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Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us to stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time.

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An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves.

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They kept at it, failing to consider the wisdom of always placing their orders from the same two cell phones and taking delivery at the same two addresses.

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“Look, blundering’s really not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that you get stuff done. A lot of people, when they contemplate the enormity of the task and they see all that’s entailed, they’re stopped in their tracks.

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Interference from other events can distort memory. Suppose the police interview a witness shortly after a crime, showing pictures of possible suspects.

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What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another

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person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.

Ref. AC9F-Z

The curse-of-knowledge effect is close kin to hindsight bias, or what is often called the knew-it-all-along effect, in which we view events after the fact as having been more predictable than they were before they occurred.

Ref. 50E1-A

Accounts that sound familiar can create the feeling of knowing and be mistaken for true.

Ref. 0377-B

technique—even a big lie told repeatedly can come to be accepted as truth.

Ref. 24DF-C

Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content.

Ref. 07FD-D

For example, if you read a particularly lucid presentation of a difficult concept, you can get the idea that it is actually pretty simple and perhaps even that you knew it all along. As discussed earlier, students who study by rereading their texts can mistake their fluency with a text, gained from rereading, for possession of accessible knowledge of the subject and consequently overestimate how well they will do on a test.

Ref. 19E5-E

contagion of memory”: one person’s error can “infect” another person’s memory. Of course, social influences are not always bad. If someone recalls details of joint memory on which you are somewhat hazy, your subsequent memory will be updated and will hold a more accurate record of the past event.

Ref. 2DD9-F

The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it.

Ref. DDE4-G

Mazur of Harvard. Why? As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory (the curse of

Ref. 2AB5-H

Like the infant who calls the stranger Dada, we must cultivate the ability to discern when our mental models aren’t working: when a situation that seems familiar is actually different and requires that we reach for a different

Ref. 3CAC-I

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.

Ref. 839F-J

This phenomenon, of particular interest for metacognition, has been named the Dunning-Kruger effect after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger.

Ref. 3686-K

Their research showed that incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve.

Ref. 9508-L

Dunning and Kruger have also shown that incompetent people can be taught to raise their competence by learning the skills to judge their own performance more accurately, in short, to make their metacognition more accurate.

Ref. FBDE-M

One is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others in everyday life, because people don’t like to deliver the bad news.

Ref. EBBE-N

Even if people get negative feedback, they must come to an accurate understanding of why the failure

Ref. 14A3-O

For success everything must go right, but by contrast, failure can be attributed to any number of external causes: it’s easy to blame the

Ref. C0BD-P

Finally, Dunning and Kruger suggest that some people are just not astute at reading how other people are performing and are therefore less able to spot competence when they see it, making them less able to make comparative judgments of their own performance.

Ref. 3007-Q

It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit.

Ref. 923D-R