Quotes About Learning

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.

you practice elaboration, there's no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. 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.

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities.

Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you.

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

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.

two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics.

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

In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we need to do better. We can steer clear of similar challenges in the future, or we can redouble our efforts to master them, broadening our capacities and expertise.

Dynamic testing has three steps. Step 1: a test of some kind—perhaps an experience or a paper exam—shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill. Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques of effective learning. Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works better now but also, and especially, to where I still need more work.

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

Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient," Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

By massed practice we mean the single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you're trying to burn into memory, the "practice-practice-practice" of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.

It's one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it's something else to demonstrate mastery. 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. When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it.

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

While cramming can produce better scores on an immediate exam, the advantage quickly fades because there is much greater forgetting after rereading than after retrieval practice. The benefits of retrieval practice are long-term.

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.

People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class—you can burn it into memory. Not so.

retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, reflection, and elaboration.

a failure to know the areas where their learning is weak—that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge—and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery.11

The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.

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. When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it.