CO: Welcome, listeners, to the Modern Classical Education at Home podcast! We are: Jenn Naughton, Courtney Ostaff, and Andrew Campbell.
AJC: Over the last few episodes, we’ve been talking about big subjects like the importance of background knowledge and the goals of education. Today we’re going to discuss a book that deals with the brass tacks of learning: how to help students remember information. This is what is usually referred to as memory work in the classical education world—that is, explicit and intentional practice in memorization—or retrieval practice in mainstream educational circles. Both terms refer to ways of helping students move information into long-term memory—which, as we’ll see, is one way of defining learning itself.
CAO: Last week, I was reading a Twitter thread that Blake Harvard had started off by pointing out how little teachers learn about memory in most education school classes. There was some disagreement and then Dylan Wiliam waded in with this Tweet:
Actually, that is the only thing I think we should be teaching for. If students can't recall something we have taught from their memory, then our teaching has been a complete waste of time.
Naturally, folks disagreed, but Wiliam is no fringe thinker. He’s a widely respected British academic with a focus on teaching and learning. Here are two internationally respected cognitive scientists saying essentially the same thing:
“Learning is a change in long-term memory.”
Those scientists would be Kirschner and Hendrick writing in 2020’s How Learning Happens (p. 172). While that’s a great book, Make It Stick is written for the mass market and as such, is a little easier to read. Rather than straightforward recitation of facts, it’s centered around stories. As Willingham noted in Why Don’t Students Like School? stories are privileged in memory, and so Make It Stick is designed, well, to make it stick.
What Harvard, William, Kirschner, and Hendrick, as well as Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel all agree on is that memory is the heart of learning. We can’t think about what we don’t know. Most adults would agree that we continue learning throughout our lives, and that learning isn’t always easy or natural. Blake Harvard, who teaches AP Psychology in Alabama, believes this so much that the name of his blog on learning and teaching is The Effortful Educator. Other key items from Make It Stick include:
We’re poor judges of our own learning.
Rereading texts and massed problem practice are preferred learning techniques, but they are relatively poor ways to study.
Retrieval practice (flashcards, quizzes, etc.) is better than rereading.
Spaced practice and interleaved practice feel harder and less productive, but make the learning last longer and lets you get better problem solving skills.
Trying to solve before being taught the solution is actually not a terrible idea.
Learning styles are fake news.
Generalizing the underlying rules helps you acquire problem-solving skills.
All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
If you practice elaboration, there’s no known limit to your learning.
Deliberating, enlarging your schema, or putting knowledge into a larger context, helps learning.
Learning physically changes your brain—and can, to some extent, make you smarter.
AJC: In this episode, we’re going to talk about this book chapter by chapter. We are by no means going to cover all the information; we’re simply going to highlight some items that we found interesting and useful. We hope you’ll find these ideas intriguing enough to read the book yourself!
Let’s get started.
The title of chapter 1 is: Learning is Misunderstood
By learning, they mean: “acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.” (my emphasis -AJC)
In other words, learning something means having it in your long-term memory and accessible for use.
CAO: Notice that they’re not saying that students should be able to figure it out from the facts that they do know, but that the information should be easy to recall. When math teachers say, “Oh, well, Tommy can figure out 8 x 10 because he knows 4 x 10 is forty and he knows four plus four is eight”—this is not good enough. Tommy doesn’t actually know 8 x 10. And, a student with poor working memory—who might be a student with autism or ADHD or another learning disability—won’t be able to hold that procedure in their working memory long enough to effectively handle figuring out 80. They need to have that information down cold in order to do more complex math down the road.
JN: I’d like to add that it’s easy to get wrapped up in grade levels and push kids to learn faster than they are able. With my youngest kid we took an entire school year to review fractions, decimals, and multiplication tables before moving on to Pre Algebra. That paid off in spades when we got to Algebra. Having all of that information down pat makes higher math so much easier.
AJC: “Retrieval practice” is a term of art here. They’re not talking about puppies fetching balls. Instead, they're talking about practicing recalling facts or concepts or events from memory.
Furthermore, the authors say that “Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.” (Emphasis in original.) Learning is hard work. It’s not always fun. It can be mentally exhausting, which is why kids and adults alike whine and moan and twist themselves into knots trying to avoid it. I include myself here! But it’s absolutely worth it—and ultimately, helping our kids learn is the whole point of homeschooling.
CAO: One of the other key items here is that “All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.” (Emphasis in original.) We did an entire podcast in February about the importance of background knowledge. In it, we provided examples of why background knowledge is important and reviewed concrete ways for students to improve their background knowledge. As homeschoolers, we think the best way to handle this is to become an educational architect, as we talked about in March of 2021.
AJC: However, we can’t just hand books off to students and expect them to self teach. Very few people in the world are successful autodidacts, especially in subjects that don’t interest them. Our responsibility as educators is to illuminate connections between pieces of information, to make explicit connections for students between what they know and what they’re trying to learn. You matter. Your child’s teachers, if you hire tutors or outsource, or even send your child to school—they all matter immensely.
One of the most important factors in teacher quality is what teachers themselves know. A 2005 OECD study ranks teacher subject matter knowledge as one of the key indicators for improving education. Of course, as homeschoolers, we typically aren’t multiply-certified teachers. That’s OK! Wisely choosing curriculum written by subject matter experts in consultation with instructional design experts can go a long way.
CAO: And, as homeschoolers, we have a major advantage. These are our children. We know them better than almost anyone else. Take math, for example, which intimidates many homeschooling parents, and is often outsourced. We tend to think that someone who is a math specialist might teach our children better than we can.
However, Michael Pershan, a math teacher at St. Anne’s school in New York, reviewed some research on his blog recently and concluded that “If you just look at specialization of teachers, there’s a significant reduction of teacher effectiveness, especially for math.” Why? Here’s Michael again: “...specialization reduces the strength of the teacher’s relationship with their students.”
What do we, as homeschool parents, have that outsourced teachers do not? Hopefully, strong relationships with our children.
JN: With my introverted, autistic kids, outsourcing would have been entirely too stressful for all of us. For some kids learning from their parents who love them unconditionally is the only good option for moving forward. I would have had to pay thousands of dollars, and there would be no guarantee that my kid would feel comfortable enough to absorb information from a stranger.
CAO: One of my favorite quotes from Make It Stick is this:
“Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up a house. Building the house requires not only knowledge of countless different fittings and materials but conceptual understanding…Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.” (pp. 18-19).
AJC: This metaphor comparing learning to construction is actually very old. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says, “as you will become a good builder from building well, so you will become a bad one from building badly. Were this not so, there would be no need for teachers of the arts, but everybody would be born a good or bad craftsman as the case might be.”
JN: You learn better when it’s difficult—that’s why both students and teachers dislike busy work. Now, everything shouldn’t be super hard—but some of it should be.
For example, we’ve all seen kids who ace every single class in high school but struggle in college because they never learned how to study.
Spaced repetition FTW—after a day, 3 days, a week, a month—keep coming back to the information that you want your kids to have mastered.
AJC: Yes. This is how the memory work in EWS is structured and how I suggest people use the material in Living Memory. It’s how I study foreign language vocabulary myself. This stuff works.
JN: And why programs like Duolingo or MemRise can’t be the only way you learn a foreign language…
AJC: Right. To acquire a language, you need immersion for grammar and pronunciation, but spaced repetition software is great for reviewing vocab.
CAO: The thing is, especially with neurodivergent children, you can only know what students know if you assess their knowledge regularly. A bird unit study is fun and lovely, but unless you quiz your children at the end and see what they actually remember, you don’t actually know if they learned anything. No prompting either! No, “Tommy, remember when we went to the aviary?” They have to know it for themselves, or they don’t actually know it.
As classroom teachers regularly sigh, you cannot assume that children will understand or remember what they studied even last week! In fact, they probably won’t unless you have explicitly and systematically reviewed the material. Good curriculum will do this for you, but even then, you need to follow through.
The other thing is, as Make It Stick says, “[S]tudents who don’t quiz themselves (and most do not) tend to overestimate how well they have mastered class material.” This is why just asking “did you get that? Do you understand?” doesn’t cut it. We all laughed at Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but we’re all guilty of just going on and not actually quizzing students. In the classroom, teachers like Adam Boxer are enthusiastic proponents of mini whiteboards, but there’s no reason why you can’t use them in the homeschool as well. I have three, one with permanent lines for my youngest children practicing handwriting, and another with graph paper.
AJC: Mini whiteboards are great ways to have students practice elaboration, or “the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.” In neoclassical education, we often call this narration. Curricula that teach narration skills include Writing with Ease from The Well-Trained Mind and my own Exploring the World through Story. We might also practice elaboration by summarizing in outline or visual form. Again, those skills are taught in programs like Writing with Skill, EWS, and in Core Knowledge’s ELA.
JN: We also use whiteboards, and they are amazing for kids with perfectionist tendencies. As usual, I’m ready with a link for you to my favorite online source: My Whiteboard.Com They have lined, blanks, maps, music—so many whiteboards and dry erase markers. Even now in high school, Declan would prefer to write his narrations and outlines on our bigger 11x17 whiteboard. And no—we don't get a commission or anything from that place. Right now, we use the whiteboard collaboratively to brainstorm ideas before he writes essays for me. If you are using Write By Number, whiteboards will work like a dream for a long time.
CAO: One of the key components of a good curriculum is showing examples and non-examples, because this helps students “extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect the model to prior knowledge.” What’s a mental model? “A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.”
Now, not all folks can close their eyes and visualize something (the inability to do so is called aphantasia, by the way), but everyone connects knowledge in these mental models. We can help students create these models by teaching them to take notes. Sketchnotes are common—and old school! One of the most famous is Galileo’s notebook with his observations of the moons of Jupiter. In literature, we often think about Freytag’s pyramid and commonly teach children about rising and falling action. These are all examples of using graphic organizers to represent mental models.
AJC: Another key component of a good curriculum is built-in retrieval practice. As Make It Stick says, “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.” (My emphasis -AJC.) Not all of us have the spoons to create weekly quizzes, monthly tests, massive flashcard decks, and so on, so a curriculum that comes with these built in will help immensely.
JN: My top picks for curricula that include retrieval practice in their plans are: Memoria Press, Sadlier Vocabulary with plans from Kolbe, and Rod and Staff Math.
CAO: This slides right into the next chapter, titled, To Learn, Retrieve. It’s important to remember that we’re not advocating all flashcards, all the time. Although, I will say, Elena’s getting much better at her addition and subtraction facts with Rod and Staff’s daily flashcard practice. But, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel point out that
“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.” (p. 27).
Visualizing and mentally rehearsing are also powerful! The problem is that mental rehearsal is pretty difficult to check, especially in younger students. That’s when graphic organizers come in handy—they’re a way to see what your children “see” in their minds.
Again, these are not new ideas. On page 28, they point out:
“In his essay on memory, Aristotle wrote: ‘exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.’ Francis Bacon wrote about this phenomenon, as did the psychologist William James. Today, we know from empirical research that practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than reexposure to the original material does. This is the testing effect, also known as the retrieval-practice effect.”
Mindless recitation isn’t nearly as helpful as intent, deliberate practice. For that reason, it’s better to space out the learning, to allow a little forgetting to happen, and then make it harder to remember. The more effort, the more you learn.
AJC: One of the easiest ways to do this is to have students implement a Leitner box. Sebastian Leitner was a German scientist who developed a system for spaced practice of flashcards. Classical educators have long used this system.
Shuffling cards back and forth between the groups in the flashcard box helps interleave the cards to provide discrimination practice, allowing students to quickly select the right answer among a small group of choices. Dumping all their different classes into one box varies the practice, which helps students “build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit.” (p. 65).
While free software does exist that automatically shuffles cards based on Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve and Leitner’s algorithm (Tiny Cards, Anki, and Memrise are three of the most popular), not everyone wants to fiddle with tech or can afford to give their kids a tablet for memory work. But most folks can lay hands on a 50-cent deck of index cards, pencils, scissors, and plastic baggies to keep cards sorted.
As students memorize the information, it gradually moves to the back of their recitation schedule, but never entirely disappears. At the end of the year, students have built up a considerable body of knowledge with individualized practice based on their own interleaved, interval-spaced retrieval practice.
JN: We are big fans of the website Quizlet. You can make a free account and save all the things you want your kids to memorize there. Then they’ll have the choice of practicing through learning, matching, spelling, writing, and finally testing the knowledge on the virtual cards that you created. My pro- tip is to search your curricula first because there are a ton of premade sets already saved and you won’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Repetitive exposure does not lead to retention. Just because you look at a piece of information (or a bright red fire extinguisher) multiple times, doesn’t mean that information is ‘burned’ into your mind—or that you’ll remember where the extinguisher is when a fire breaks out. Instead, information needs context and purpose to stick.
This is why I no longer recommend Lit-Based Curricula as your only education method. You can be exposed to different periods in history a hundred times and not remember the details. I’m a fan of historical fiction and feel it can do wonders in helping kids to see how people felt and acted during that time. But, you need another component to establish hooks and build context around memories that make them easily accessible when needed. This is usually a textbook-based program.
AJC: I agree. A traditional Charlotte Mason program and the better modern lit-based curricula will have some level of retrieval practice in the form of narration, but in my experience, that’s rarely enough to get most students to move information reliably into long-term memory. Narrations are often given immediately after a reading, while the details are still fresh in the student’s mind, which doesn’t allow for the forgetting curve. If you really want to build your homeschool curriculum around a lit-based program, consider creating targeted memory work to make sure that students are getting regular retrieval practice.
CAO: As the authors promised in the introduction, they use mixed practice to discuss the major concepts in the book. In fact, Chapter 3 is titled: Mix Up Your Practice. This might be obvious if you’ve ever crammed for a test, but, like, hello? You will likely remember little or nothing of material even a day or two after the test. To be most effective, practice should be (1) spaced, (2) interleaved, and (3) varied.
What does this mean when choosing homeschool curricula? One of the big debates is between mastery (each concept is taught only once, but thoroughly; students are not taught the concept again. Ex: Math-U-See, many handwriting programs) and spiral curriculum (concepts are reviewed throughout the year, more depth of knowledge is added at each visit. Ex: Saxon Math, many world language programs).
The merits of each type are debated, but given that cognitive science supports interleaved, interval-spaced retrieval practice, a spiral design benefits most students. I choose a spiral curriculum whenever possible. This means “a spiraling series of exercises that cycle back to key skill sets in a seemingly random sequence that adds layers of context and meaning at each turn” (pg. 50).
AJC: Many US curricula combine the worst parts of mastery and spiral curricula. For example, most math textbooks have a chapter on fractions. Students learn one type of fraction per lesson, take a chapter test, and don’t learn about fractions again until the next year. While technically this is a spiral, this is not a useful spiral—instead, as Willingham writes in When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education, “students don’t stick with any topic long enough to develop a deep conceptual understanding.”
In poor curricula:
practice is not spaced—students have one or two days to learn
practice isn’t interleaved—homework has 10 problems of type 1, 10 of type 2, and 10 of type 3, in that order.
practice is not varied—homework is only on that day’s concepts or procedures.
CAO: Parents and children tend to dislike intensive spiral curricula because spacing out practice means that students have to put forth more effort to remember; interleaved practice feels more difficult than massed practice; it seems hard, chaotic, or boring; and varied practice loses the sense of mastery students get from successfully completing ten problems in a row. And that makes kids cranky, which leads to whining, am I right?
Do it anyway. Choose a curriculum with built-in interleaved, interval-spaced retrieval practice whenever possible.
JN: Saxon Math comes to mind immediately when I think about spaced retrieval practice. A few of my kids had a hate/tolerate relationship with it. This is where I’ll jump in and tell you that kids don’t have to love or even like their materials. Sometimes they do, and that’s cool. But oftentimes you, as the parent, simply have to insist that the work be done. I jumped around to different curricula too many times thinking that if the student liked it, they would work harder (or at least with fewer complaints). That hardly ever worked.
Anyone who thinks that their kids are not capable of memorizing huge swaths of material need look no farther than Pokemon, Minecraft formulas, and whatever their special interest contains. Dinosaurs anyone?
AJC: Can you say pachycephalosaurus? I knew you could!
JN: Real learning is usually not easy—and ‘learning to learn’ is worth your time. People are capable of great things, but your kids don’t have to already be great at anything in grade school.
CAO: Chapter 4 is called Embrace Difficulties. Learning is supposed to be hard, and in fact, some curricula advertise just that. Art of Problem Solving, the company behind the popular curriculum Beast Academy, is specially designed to challenge gifted children. As per the New Yorker, “Rusczyk, … founded Art of Problem Solving—or AoPS—eighteen years ago as a resource for budding math prodigies.” For those of us with children who are not math prodigies, finding good curricula can be a bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
However, Make It Stick has some good suggestions. They divide learning into encoding, or watching someone demonstrate the item to be learned; consolidation, pushing learning into our long-term memory through practice and making connections to prior knowledge; and retrieval, etching it into our neurons with cues for later recall. A good curriculum will facilitate all three parts: examples, practice, and quizzing.
One of the points that the book makes that I, personally, find fascinating is that even if we forget something (and let’s be frank, we’ve all forgotten a lot over the years),
“Knowledge that is well entrenched, like real fluency in French or years of experience driving on the right side of the road, is easily relearned later, after a period of disuse or after being interrupted by competition for retrieval cues. It’s not the knowledge itself that has been forgotten, but the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it” (p. 77).
Yes, Virginia, even if you can’t remember odd bits of your high school education now, it’s still in there, rattling around loose in your brain. You can relearn it, if you like, and the process will be much easier than if you’d never learned it.
AJC: I can vouch for that. The only time I’ve ever needed Algebra II is on standardized tests, starting with the NYS Regents Exams and the SATs in high school. I’ve had to relearn it several times since, first for the GREs and then for placement tests for other college work. It gets easier each time.
JN: On page 91, the authors say, “... students who have a high fear of making errors when taking tests may actually do worse on the test because of their anxiety … leaving less working memory capacity available to solve the problems posed by the test.” The best way to alleviate test anxiety is something you can do at home. Make sure that your kids know what will be on each and every test. Make sure that they have the information down cold before you give them the quiz or test. Don’t worry about how long it takes. Simply keep moving forward every day. After enough time even kids who suffer from severe anxiety end up looking forward to test days.
A caveat is that eventually they’ll grow up and go to college, where it doesn't work that way anymore, but they’ll have the study skills in place to be as prepared as they can be in the time given them.
CAO: In Chapter 5, the authors advise you to Avoid Illusions of Knowing, and they mention one of my favorite nonfiction reads of the last few years, Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Essentially, our brains have two systems: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. Because we’re inherently slothful, we lean into the fast, intuitive thinking, and, to use one of my favorite examples, we trip over it every time. Thinking, Fast and Slow is really about how we think (and deeply relevant to those who struggle with executive function), but in terms of learning, the book is useful for helping us uncover cognitive biases about what we think we know.
We are actually extremely poor judges of how much we know. Think of a time you studied and studied for an exam, and failed. Obviously, you didn’t know as much as you thought you knew.
Uncomfortably, our memory is often distorted because our brain recreates the memory every time we call it back up, until eventually it bears little resemblance to the original product. Here’s a great way to test your memory. Think of a bicycle. Got it? Now, draw one. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
What happened? If you were stymied, you’re not alone. We think we know more than we do.
AJC: In fact, our brains can create false memories out of whole cloth. If you’re old enough, you may remember the Satanic panic of the 1980s, when folks were convinced there were secret Satanists running daycares. Before we understood how delicate memories were, people went to jail because children had been influenced so as to create false memories of abuse.
Perhaps more commonly, folks think that they’re better at something than they are. AAA released a study noting that “Despite the fact that more than 90 percent of crashes are the result of human error, three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. drivers consider themselves better-than-average drivers.” We know better, of course, which is why Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “...where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average” makes people laugh. Psychologists call this the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” As Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel note, the journal article that called out this phenomenon was titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”
JN: If we’re such bad judges of what we don’t know, “student-directed learning,” beloved by unschoolers, makes no sense. How can students possibly know best, when they don’t know what they don’t know? The adult in the room needs to check for understanding in a meaningful way, and assign work to make sure the child gets better at the topic. For example, I often need to have a conversation with my teens where I explain why every citizen should have a basic level of knowledge in all of the sciences.
CAO: Chapter 6 is pretty blunt. They say, Get Beyond Learning Styles. We’ll be blunt too. We’ve said this many, many times in past episodes, but learning styles are bunk. You do not need to tailor your teaching to your child’s supposed “learning style.” You do not need to buy curriculum advertised as appropriate for “visual” or “kinesthetic” learners—and we’d actually suggest that you run fast and far if you see that kind of marketing because it indicates that the curriculum provider doesn’t actually know much about education.
AJC: You do need to be aware of their individual needs, physical, mental, and emotional. Children who are hungry or tired or anxious or physically uncomfortable do not learn well. Children who are neurodivergent can have highly idiosyncratic needs with regard to their environment, pacing, and other aspects of learning. Children with learning disabilities need accommodations just as surely as a person who cannot walk needs mobility aids like wheelchairs, ramps, and lifts. None of those things are “learning styles” as the term is commonly used.
Multimodal learning is a real thing. Students who see and hear and say and write a word in a foreign language are much more likely to remember that word than students who do only one or two of those things. That’s common sense: the more repetition, the more likely you are to remember. That said, mere repetition does not enhance learning; the repetition has to be spaced to overcome the “forgetting curve.”
CAO: They do mention that language fluency and reading ability matters immensely for learning, and may actually be the most important thing. These are not learning styles. Fluency is how easily someone reads, and ability is how well someone reads. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, and it needs to be addressed early and thoroughly in order for a child to make the most of their education. We have mentioned this before, as well.
We have discussed intelligence before, and Make It Stick offers a couple of different theories. First, there is the division into fluid intelligence, or abstract reasoning ability combined with working memory, and crystallized intelligence, or all of the things you’ve learned. No one has successfully increased working memory, but educators can definitely increase crystallized intelligence. Second, they share Sternberg’s view of intelligence as a three-part item: analytical intelligence, or problem-solving ability; creative intelligence, or synthesizing prior knowledge to apply to new situations; and practical intelligence, or street smarts. In this analysis, I’d be very low on practical intelligence, I have to admit.
Either way, they point out that “cultivating the habit of reflecting on one’s experiences, of making them into a story, strengthens learning.” (p. 155). Dear diary, indeed!
AJC: How can educators help students memorize the vast quantities of information needed to succeed in modern society? As Kirschner and Hendrick note in How Learning Happens, the two best techniques for teacher implementation are spaced practice: “small, frequent homework assignments that include new and previously treated material, cumulative tests, short review sessions at the beginning of the lesson, spiral curriculum, etc.” and the testing effect: “quizzes, practice tests, and review questions” (pg. 213).
Let’s be frank, asking a frazzled homeschooler to create an interwoven set of assignments while designing a high-quality curriculum from scratch is like plopping a high school band student in a professional musician’s studio and expecting them to write an orchestral score. Interweaving all these complex threads of student learning is not an easy task.
Therefore, you’re going to want a high-quality, knowledge-rich curriculum created by subject experts with teaching experience. Shocking, I know.
JN: They offer an important piece of advice. “Break your idea or desired competency down into its component parts.” (p. 160). If we want our children to be good at something, like writing a report for any kind of workplace, then we have to break it down into small bites they can use to build into the larger body of knowledge. For example, I want Declan to be able to write clearly and not in techno jargon, so I broke it down into explaining that not everyone who reads about engines may want to study every aspect of them. Sometimes they just want to know what is wrong with their car. It’s enough that he knows the back end of the problem. So we practiced having him write out sample repair explanations of very simple things like oil changes and then have moved up from there. And you know what? I get it now, and I know nothing about cars. Now he may or not be a mechanic, but these skills are obviously transferable. This works for everything from Algebra to Astronomy. Want your kid to memorize the solar system? Start small, adding more and more information as you go. Again, take your time.
CAO: Unfortunately, chapter 7 opens with a description of the marshmallow effect. For those of you who don’t know, the idea was that they would test the self-control of young children, four year olds if I recall correctly, by offering them a marshmallow and telling them that if they waited, they could get a second marshmallow. And then they did follow up studies that showed that children with good self-regulation, the children who waited to get a second treat, were more successful in life.
However, there were some problematic aspects of that study. Specifically, a long-term analysis shows that the kids who didn’t wait aren’t any less successful, health, wealth, or otherwise. In fact, modern studies show that if you control for socio-economic status, there is no meaningful difference. This is heavily influenced by cultural differences, as well. Twice as many Cameroonian children waited, and they have such excellent self-regulation skills that some of them fell asleep while waiting! Can you imagine your average USAian 4-year-old waiting for a sugary treat and falling asleep because they were so bored?
However, the chapter mostly focuses on strategies for getting more out of the cards you’ve been dealt, cognitively speaking. They point out that unlike what I learned in high school biology class, we now know that the brain changes, even in adulthood, allowing us to learn new things. Those changes, in turn, are reflected in the brain’s architecture.
AJC: They also point out that poor nutrition, poor education, and poor child rearing negatively affect IQ, and that the way we care for poor children leads to stunted IQs. They do point out that “there is no body of evidence supporting the conclusion that early education, preschool, or language training would show IQ gains in children from better-off families, where they already benefit from the advantages of a richer environment.” (p. 176).
Brain training is another area of fake news. Scientists believe that any shown benefits are probably not in working memory, but in mental habits such as focusing attention and persistence. Instead, they recommend embracing a growth mindset, or the idea that you can get smarter through hard work; practicing like an expert, or repeatedly striving to reach beyond your current level of performance; and constructing memory cues, or mnemonic devices such as singing the alphabet song.
Mnemonics can be very useful as a way of consolidating information in memory. There are many types of mnemonic devices, but one of the most common is using the initial letters of the words in a phrase or sentence to stand in for sequenced content. For example, you can use Every Good Boy Does Fine to remember the lines on the G-clef music staff, or King Phillip Came Over for Good Spaghetti for the levels of taxonomy, or Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally for the order of operations in arithmetic. In Living Memory and EWS, I use this type of mnemonic to teach the steps in revising and editing a piece of writing.
Another common mnemonic technique is visualization—which, I should note, is not effective for people with aphantasia, as Courtney mentioned earlier. This is also known as the “memory palace” technique or the “method of loci”—that last word being the Latin for “places,” not the Norse god of mischief. I’m currently studying Chinese with the Mandarin Blueprint course, which has students use visualization to learn the pronunciation, meaning, and form of Chinese characters. Effectively, you’re creating wacky mini movies in your head. It’s fun and highly effective for those with good visual memories. (I highly recommend Mandarin Blueprint for older teens and adult learners!)
We’ve talked before about how we can “chunk” little pieces of information together to make it easier to remember. Remember, memorizing things expands students’ long-term memories and expands their schemas, making better use of their limited short-term memory. For students on the lower end of the working memory scale, memorizing vast swathes of knowledge is critical for problem solving, because they can’t afford to figure it out as they go—their working memory doesn’t permit them the time or space. To quote the shoe giant Nike, these students need to be able to “just do it,” or they’ll forget what they’re doing in the middle of a lengthy question.
JN: We used a program popular with old-timey homeschoolers called…something I can’t remember! I searched all over and couldn’t find the name. Basically you had single blocks and a cardboard shield—there were exercises where you either give the student a minute to memorize the pattern that the teacher made and recreate it, one where you would say put the red block behind the blue block (to build spatial awareness) and so on. There are Critical Thinking workbooks called Building Thinking Skills that do the same thing in print—but this old mystery program was the best. If anyone knows what it’s called, reach out to me and I’ll update the show notes.
AJC: The final chapter of Make It Stick gives concrete suggestions for how to apply the principles the authors have presented throughout the text. Here we’ll briefly recap the tips they offer for teachers, but we really do think this whole book is worth your time.
CAO: Explain to Students How Learning Works: Very simply, this means telling them that learning is not effortless and that hard work is necessary for success.
JN: Teach Students How to Study: Rereading, massed practice, and cramming are not optimal. Explicitly teach kids better ways to learn, like spaced practice, self-quizzing, and elaboration. You can do this by using these tools in your teaching when children are younger and then by helping older students implement them independently.
AJC: Create Desirable Difficulties: e.g., frequent low- or no-stakes quizzing; curriculum or exercises that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration; regular review of material previously studied (continue to review memory work); space, interleave, and vary topics and problems.
Finally, Be Transparent: Let them know you’re doing all this, not because you’re a monster ;) but because effortful learning is effective learning.
CAO: And that brings us to the end of the book! So, Jenn, tell us what’s going on with Bookish!
JN: We are registering kids and teens for our Summer and Fall classes right now. We’ve got some fun books scheduled and I’d like to mention that we invite neurodivergent students to try us out, even if online learning hasn’t worked in the past. We’re experienced in supporting all kinds of brains.
Drew, what’s up with Quidnam Press?
AJC: I recently finished up my annual Spring Sale. I’m really grateful for all the interest in EWS and for everyone’s support of my little, one-person business. Courtney, how’s by you?
CAO: Coming down the last few weeks of the semester! I switched Elena out to Rod & Staff math because I felt like she needed more automaticity in double-digit addition and subtraction, and I was pleased to find that she seems energized by the idea of timed practice, instead of intimidated. This summer, I’ll be prepping for that high school astronomy class, so my to-do list is unfolding as we speak.
JN: That’s it for today! If you found this episode valuable, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.
SHOW NOTES
Books:
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, et al.
How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education by Daniel Willingham
Articles:
“Is subject specialization in elementary school worth it?” by Michael Pershan
“Researcher Behind ‘10,000-Hour Rule’ Says Good Teaching Matters, Not Just Practice” By Jeffrey R. Young
“Richard Rusczyk’s Worldwide Math Camp” by Ingfei Chen
“Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers” by OECD
“What are Sketchnotes?” by rohDesign
Audio/Video:
Becoming an Educational Architect by MCE@H
How to Study Effectively with Flash Cards by College Info Geek
Make sure students are ready to practice with mini-whiteboards by Adam Boxer and Tips for Teachers
The Importance of Background Knowledge by MCE@H
Websites:
Learning Styles FAQ by Daniel Willingham
The Effortful Educator by Blake Harvard
WHERE TO FIND US ONLINE
Modern Classical Education at Home website, Facebook, Instagram, Substack
The Bookish Society (Jenn Naughton): website, Facebook, Instagram
Quidnam Press (Andrew Campbell): website, Facebook, Instagram