This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 21 of the Cult of Pedagogy

podcast. In this episode I interview Peter Brown, one of the authors of our

summer 2015 book pick Make It Stick.

This summer I was not planning on doing a book study. Last summer I did two and I

thought this summer I would take a break. But then I came across this book called

Make It Stick and not only did the cover grab me because it did not look like a

typical education book. It was just a simple blue cover with a gold star on it.

But then I saw all the reviews. It had a ton of five star reviews and then I

found out that the authors were a team of three people, two cognitive

psychologists and a novelist and I thought that's really different too. So then

I read about the book's premise and that is what really sold me. So here is the

premise of the book. Again the book is called Make It Stick, the science of

successful learning. Here's the basic idea of this book. What we believe about

learning and what most people do to study and learn material is basically wrong.

It is not backed by science. So here's an example. For a lot of us in college the

way we would study would be to just open up the textbook and read and reread and

highlight and reread some more. It turns out that's actually not the most

effective way to learn. What actually is more effective and this is just one

concept I'm going to give you from the book is frequent retrieval practice. So

basically self-quizzing and teachers can use this too instead of teaching and

teaching and teaching and teaching and then giving a quiz or a test at the end

of a long period of time. We can actually help our students learn by

...