Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

The authors continue to distinguish between short-term and long-term learning and suggest that in order for learned information to be useful, it needs to be recalled and made applicable in the long-term.

Massed practice—recalling the same information again and again in a row—is a long-favored strategy among educators, tempting because learners see real-time progress. The authors denounce massed practice as an ineffective strategy as rapid learning without spaced, interleaved, and varied practice is followed by rapid forgetting (47).

Spaced practice involves returning to subjects or skills after increments of time that allow for some degree of forgetting, so the resulting recall is effortful.

Interleaved practice involves learning and practicing several skills or subjects at the same time rather than moving on from one to another. Studies show that this strategy is effective in durable “mastery and long-term retention” (50).

Varied practice—practicing related skills or intersecting subjects in addition to target skills—aids learning because it “improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another” (51).

All of these practice strategies help learners to “assess context and discriminate between problems, selecting and applying the correct solution from a range of possibilities” (53).