Making It Stick - Critiquing the Authors Use (or Missed Opportunities) of Their Own Strategies

In the book, "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," by Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel, the authors employed a number of strategies to help make the ideas and concepts in the book "stick" for their readers. In fact, they exemplified a couple of key strategies that they state lead to better learning. 

For starters, the book is riddled with many anecdotes related to the strategy they are explaining. Once they introduce a strategy, they don't stop there. They continue on to give stories that show what that strategy looks like in action and how it helped the people in the story either learn better or hold them back. In a sense, this is a form of elaboration. The authors explain that elaboration is "the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material" and that learners can do this by "relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to you life outside of class" (pp. 207). By telling so many anecdotes throughout the book, they are demonstrating what elaboration looks like. For example, when you read about something new, you shouldn't just stop there. You should take a moment to reflect and think about how you can connect it to other stories, experiences, or knowledge that you already have. They go on to say that "A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a metaphor or visual image for the new material" (pp. 207). By telling these stories, they are simultaneously producing visuals in their readers minds, which will lead to better retention of the concepts. 

Another strategy they demonstrate in the book is the idea of reflection and the role it plays in successful learning. At the end of the each chapter, there is a Takeaway section that serves as a brief review of the key concepts from that chapter and that serve as a way of demonstrating how one might pause to reflect on the important ideas mentioned in something that they have just read before they move on to the next chapter. Sometimes they incorporate questions in these Takeaways that readers could use to help them strengthen their connections with the material, and other times they are simply concise reviews of the chapter. 

One strategy that I think they could incorporate into this book is quizzing for retrieval practice. I think it would be fairly easy to create an end of chapter "quiz" that reinforces the key concepts from that chapter. Then as the book progresses, the quizzes could incorporate some questions from that chapter and also from previous chapters to demonstrate the strategy of retrieving information by quizzing yourself. It's my opinion that students don't utilize this strategy often because they may not know what types of questions to ask themselves, so modeling what this actually looks like could be very beneficial.