On KQED’s MindShift, listen to Professor Roediger discuss retrieval practice, or quizzing, and how it aids long-term memory.

At Quartz, read Peter Brown and Henry Roediger’s top seven tips for keeping your New Year’s resolutions.

Listen to the authors discuss how to study effectively on St.

Read a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Roediger.

At Salon, read an excerpt from the book explaining why obsessive practice isn’t the key to success.

Read Roediger’s New York Times essay on the benefits of frequent, low-stakes quizzing (as opposed to rare, high-stakes testing) for achieving proficiency in new material.

Listen to Brian Johnson interview Brown for the YouTube series Optimal Living.

Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. To most of us, learning something “the hard way” implies wasted time and effort.

Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown