Hey there. Alright, so I’ve kinda speed through my reading of Make It Stick because the chapters have been so mind blowing cognitively satisfying while at the same time I feel more encouraged, for lack of a better word to describe my feelings at the moment, inspired to have a totally different design and concept to my program’s instructional design. (Edit: I initially wanted to do chapters 4, 5 and 6 because that’s how far I’ve read, but I realized one chapter is enough.)
So let’s begin:
Chapter 4: Embrace Difficulties
The chapter starts with a female soldier training how to be a parachute jumper and the course she takes has the learning in stages, with every consecutive stage more difficult that the previous.
Then the authors go on to describe how learning takes place cognitively, starting with encoding, consolidation and retrieval. They explain that by practicing your retrieval of information, sometimes in situations when you are strongly motivated to, the information that was encoded (short term memory) and consolidated (strengthening for long term memory via connection to other information) would be easily recalled and, eventually, it would be flexible enough to be understood, related and applied to different things in the learner’s life.
The authors then describe about suppressing retrieval cues when a student is in a different situation. For example, an American driving in English has to suppress the idea of driving on the left. It was also mentioned about a person called Marcel Proust who was sad that he could not recall his younger years in a French village with his aunt and uncle but when he tasted cake dipped lime blossom tea, the memories, events and people came back to him.
I suppose that since we humans are creatures of habit, certain activities that we do become retrieval cues. For example, for myself, a particular ringtone that I have for my girlfriend rings in public and I find myself feeling a sense of longing and immediate reaction of checking my phone, even if the sound was not from my phone. (And here I connected what I read to something that happened to me in real life. I also reflected about how I thought.)
The next part, to me, was the most intriguing. Really. The section was titled “Easier Isn’t Better” and I thought, “No Pain, No Gain” almost immediately. The authors explained a research involving baseball players who had to practice the different kinds of balls being thrown at them. The control group did massed practice: a set of 15 fastballs, curveballs and changeups. The experimental group, however, was given a mix of the 3 types of throws. Initially, the baseball players in the experimental group had not improved after the first 45 throws (first session). They felt that the learning was too difficult and slow. The session continued for 6 weeks, twice a week. As you might have guessed, the experimental group scored better when tested and compared to the control group. It’s interesting to note, that the baseball players in these two groups were already skilled players.
Then, the authors explained about having mental models and that through retrieval practice, you can be like the chef who has mastered the different flavours and textures interact with each other to produce new recipes and dishes. The authors elaborate by suggesting fostering conceptual learning and I feel that this is something that is lacking in the local primary schools’ teaching of English language. Well at least in my experiences from 2 schools.
The authors then suggested three ways of conceptual retrieval practice that create desirable levels of difficulty: generation, reflection and elaboration. Generation involves solving a problem which solution has not been provided. Reflection includes thinking about questions like, what were the key ideas? What are some examples? How can I relate these to what I already know? Elaboration involves a form of reflection where learners rephrase key ideas in their own words, visualizing or rehearse mentally what you would do differently next time.
An interesting result from an experiment involving college students who were tasked to write essays after topics was that the students performed better (approximately half a letter grade) on topics that they actually did a reflection on as compared to topics they didn’t do a reflection essay on.
In the next section, the authors talk about errorless learning and although explicitly it doesn’t exist in Singapore, implicitly, it’s part of the perspective of many parents and teachers. But the following is my favourite sentence:
“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.”
Later the authors gave an example of generative learning from the life of a self taught ornamental gardener who taught herself the scientific names of plants. The section showed how Bonnie, the gardener, accepted the fact that she blundered from the fact that she often made mistakes. The authors explained that it was implied that Bonnie in a way explained to her readers that it was alright to make mistakes as part of the learning process.
She learnt that learning the Latin names of plants helped her in her craft. Having said that, the authors ended the section by saying that blundering isn’t really an optimal learning strategy.
The last section talks about undesirable difficulties in learning. The authors are unsure about whether there is an overarching rule or concept about what defines an undesirable difficulty. I’m just trying (generative learning) but if I were to roughly define it, I think it would be an event, action, situation or information that impedes the progress towards mastery of a skill or knowledge and usually encourages a learner to either give up or move away from said impediment.
To put this definition to the test, keeping in mind the definition of a desired difficulty as something that learners can overcome through increased effort, even with increased effort, motivation still plays a role in learning, be it intrinsic or extrinsic.
The Million In My Head 