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🧠 Learning Hacks

Evidence-Based Strategies to Better Remember What You Learn

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Many people waste their time relying on outdated learning techniques. They use ineffective strategies like rereading and highlighting. By following these techniques, learning becomes pointless entertainment.

A research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science. The result of their work is ‘Make it stick.’

Reading more than 15 books on learning, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: 
it’s less important what kind of brain you have — what matters is how you use it.

Or, as the researchers of ‘Make it Stick’ put it:

“Elements that shape your intellectual ability lie to a surprising extent within your own control.”

Howwe learn changes our brain’s neural network. This concept, neuroplasticity, is the enabler for lifelong-learning. Whether you’re a life-long learner, a trainer, teacher, student, or a parent who wants to best help your kids, effective learning strategies can make new knowledge stick.

Here are five evidence-based strategies that help you learn better and store new knowledge in your long-term memory.

1.) Retrieval Practice

With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. For example, you might ask yourself what you remembered from the book you finished two weeks ago.

The more time has gone since your information consumption, the more difficult time you’ll have to retrieve it. Naturally, a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in. And that’s why retrieval is so powerful. In the words of the authors:

“Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting.”

While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards — some forms are better than others:

“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.”

2.) Spaced Repetition

With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals. Again, our natural forgetting curve kicks in. But the harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect:

“Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval.”

It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. To retrieve your knowledge, your brain has to work harder. And it should work hard.

As a rule of thumb: learning works best when it feels hard.

3.) Interleaving

Imagine you had to remember 100 paintings from five different epochs. Would you prefer studying one epoch after another or mixing all five?

While our intuition tells us blocking to be more effective, researchers pointed towards the benefits of interleaving:

“If your intuition tells you to block, you should probably interleave.”

Here’s what interleaving means:

“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.”

Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it facilitates forgetting. But as you will know by now, that’s the desired effect you want to achieve.

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

4.) Elaboration

Elaborating means you explain and describe an idea in your own words. You consciously associate material you want to learn with what you’ve previously learned. In the words of the book’s authors:

“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 details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better. By doing so, you’re generating more cues.

Elaborative rehearsal is a method to encode information into your long-term memory more effectively. It can be advantageous to relate the material to a personal experience or to something you already know, explaining the idea to someone else, and explaining how it relates to your life.

5.) Reflection

Reflection is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds new layers to your learning materials. Here are a few questions the authors suggest to reflect upon:

What went well?

What could have gone better?

What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?

By reflecting, you’re retrieving what you learned and connecting it to existing memories. In the words of Roediger and McDaniel:

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

6.) (Self)-Testing & Calibration

While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and bring weak areas to the light. In their book, the scientists conclude:

“It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”

To answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer is what learning scientists also call experiential learning. Even if you don’t get the right answer, the process facilitates remembering the correct answer.

Plus, objective instruments, like testing, or self-testing, help you adjust your sense of what you know and don’t know:

“One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”

Takeaway

If you only remember one thing, pick the following:

“Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

Effective learning strategies include retrieval, elaboration, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing, and reflection.

Plus, once you’ve mastered new material, you can use mnemonic devices and build memory places to help you retrieve what you’ve learned.

The Feynman Technique Can Help You Remember Everything You Read

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Books give you access to the smartest brains on our planet. And learning from the greatest thinkers and doers is your fast track to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Yet, reading per se doesn’t elevate your life. You can read 52 books a year without changing at all.

Social climber Dale Carnegie used to say knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied.And to apply what you read, you must first remember what you learned.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an expert for remembering what he learned. Bill Gates was so inspired by his pedagogy that he named Feynman, “the greatest teacher I never had.”

Why Most People Forget What They Read

Most people confuse consumption with learning. They think reading, watching, or hearing information will make the information stick with them.

Unless you’ve got a photographic memory, no idea could be further from the truth.

To protect ourselves from overstimulation, our brains filter and forget most of what we consume. If we remembered everything we absorb, we wouldn’t be able to operate in our world.

But most people act like their brains would keep everything. They focus on reading a specific number of books a year. By focusing on quantity, instead of learning, they forget anything they read. Ultimately, for them, reading is mere entertainment.

It was Schopenhauer who already stated in the 1850s, â€œWhen we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.” So to learn, we need to think by ourselves.

A person who reads without pausing to think and reflect won’t remember nor apply anything they read.

You can spot these people easily. For example, they say they’ve read a book, but lack the words to explain their takeaways. Likely, they haven’t learned a thing from reading it.

Mortimer Adler put it best when he wrote: â€œThe person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

Luckily, there’s a way out of it. We can indeed learn from what we read. And we’ve known so for a long time.

How You Can Remember What You Read

Teaching is the most effective way to embed information in your mind. Plus, it’s an easy way to check whether you’ve remembered what you read. Because before you teach, you have to take several steps: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate them using your own vocabulary.

Feynman mastered this process like no other. The people of his time knew him for being able to explain the most complex processes in the simplest language. They nicknamed Feynman “The Great Explainer.”

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, The Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. You can think of it as an algorithm for guaranteed learning.

The Feynman Technique is one method to make us remember what we read by using elaboration and association concepts. It’s a tool for remembering what you read by explaining it in plain, simple language.

Not only is the Feynman Technique a wonderful recipe for learning, but it’s also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up.

What I love about this concept is that the approach intuitively believes that intelligence is a process of growth, which dovetails nicely with the work of Carol Dweck, who beautifully describes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset. Here’s how it works.

The 4 Steps You Need To Take

In essence, the Feynman technique consists of four steps: identify the subject, explain the content, identify your knowledge gaps, simplify your explanation. Here’s how it works for any book you read:

#1 Choose the book you want to remember

After you’ve finished a book worth remembering, take out a blank sheet. Title it with the book’s name.

Then, mentally recall all principles and main points you want to keep in mind. Here, many people make the mistake to simply copy the table of content or their highlights. By not recalling the information, they skip the learning part.

What you want to do instead, is to retrieve the concepts and ideas from your own memory. Yes, this requires your brainpower. But by thinking about the concepts, you’re creating an effective learning experience.

While writing your key points, try to use the simplest language you can. Often, we use complicated jargon to mask our unknowingness. Big words and fluffy “expert words” stop us from getting to the point.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

— Albert Einstein

#2 Pretend you are explaining the content to a 12-year old

This sounds simpler than it is. In fact, explaining a concept as plain as possible requires deep understanding.

Because when you explain an idea from start to finish to a 12-year old, you force yourself to simplify relationships and connections between concepts.

If you don’t have a 12-year old around, find an interested friend, record a voice message for a mastermind group, or write down your explanation as a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or Quora.

#3 Identify your knowledge gaps and reread

Explaining a book’s key points helps you find out what you didn’t understand. There will be passages you’re crystal clear about. At other points, you will struggle. These are the valuable hints to dig deeper.

Only when you find knowledge gaps — where you omit an important aspect, search for words, or have trouble linking ideas to each other — can you really start learning.

When you know where you’re stuck go back to your book and re-read the passage until you can explain it in your own simple language.

Filling your knowledge gaps is the extra step required to really remember what you read and skipping it leads to an illusion of knowledge.

#4 Simplify Your Explanation (optional)

Depending on a book’s complexity, you might be able to explain and remember the ideas after the previous. If you feel unsure, however, you can add an additional simplification layer.

Read your notes out loud and organize them into the simplest narrative possible. Once the explanation sounds simple, it’s a great indicator that you’ve done the proper work.

It’s only when you can explain in plain language what you read that you’ll know you truly understood the content.

The Takeaway

We all know from our own experiences that knowledge is useless unless applied. But by forgetting what we read, there’s no way to apply it to our lives.

Montaigne pointed to this fact in one of his Essays where he wrote:

We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?

The Feynman Technique is an excellent way to make the wisdom from books your own. It’s a way to tear ideas apart and rebuild them from the ground up.

Here are the four steps you want to remember:

  • choose a book, get a blank page and title it
  • teach it to a 12-year old in plain, simple language
  • identify knowledge gaps and reread what you forgot
  • review and simplify your explanation (optional)

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