Roddy Roediger—Make it Stick

[00:01] Justin Baeder:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Dustin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:16] Roddy Roediger:

My guest today is Roddy Rediger. He is the James S. McDonald Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the authors of Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning.

[00:31] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:33] Roddy Roediger:

Roddy, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your research career and what's led you to creating this book with your co-authors, Peter C. Brown and Mark McDaniel.

[00:46] Roddy Roediger:

Okay, I'm a cognitive psychologist, somebody who studies how the mind works. And we do that, in my case, through experimental methods. And in particular, I've been interested in learning and remembering my whole career. So both ways of improving memory, which is what the book is about, but also I've studied things like false memories and illusions of memory, when you think you're having a memory problem. But what you're remembering, as we say, didn't really happen or didn't happen the way you think it did. But let me stick to the positive side for today because that's what the book is about.

[01:21]

And what my co-authors and I thought was that kind of psychologists have provided, amassed all this knowledge over the years. And we haven't done a particularly effective job of connecting it to the real world. And so my research took a turn, along with Mark McDaniel, the third author of the book. Our research took a turn about a decade ago of trying to apply what we've learned from the laboratory in actual school settings, so try to do experiments in schools. And so the book is, we brought in a professional writer, Peter Brown, to help us tell the story of the research and to try to avoid academic jargon as much as possible and to embed the work into the context of real people facing real problems. So we have in the book cases of neurosurgeons, cases of gardeners,

[02:14]

Cases of teachers, cases of students trying to learn, cases of police officers, all of whom are struggling. We're all lifelong learners. And so how can we improve our skills of learning and retention? And how can we apply them in the future? So in the very broadest sense, that's what the book is about, is for people, whether students or not, to be lifelong learners and how to make progress the things they're learning stick, how to retain them over the long term.

[02:47] Roddy Roediger:

Well, I think that field of cognitive psychology has so much to teach those of us who are practitioners, those of us who lead schools and who work directly with students. And a lot of my reading in the last couple of years has focused on cognitive psychology. And I think that's a terrific combination to team world-class researchers up with writers and journalists. Another book that I've really gotten a lot out of is the book Willpower by researcher Roy Baumeister and journalist John Tierney. Just a really terrific read. And I'm very excited to come across your book on how we can apply some of the recent research on learning to the work that we do in schools.

[03:27]

And it seems to me like there are quite a few misconceptions out there about how learning actually takes place. I wonder if you could share some of those that you've uncovered. What do we have wrong in normal education practice?

[03:40] Roddy Roediger:

Let me give you some examples, but one of the things that... Let me first address the question of why, if we're all lifelong donors, why would we get something wrong? And one thing that's been uncovered in research, which is very hard to uncover in our daily lives, is that sometimes...

[03:58]

factors that make short-term retention good. In other words, if we study something in a certain way, we remember it very well after a brief period of time, but often that same strategy that helps us so much in the short term turns out to hurt us in the long term. Let me give you one example. It has to do with how we are studying, with, say, the repeating information that we want to learn. So when you are learning, say, to write, I remember sitting down and practicing an A over and over again, then a B over and over again, a C over and over again. That's what we call mass practice, where you're practicing in this case when you're in first grade or let's say each letter.

[04:46]

But of course, we never actually write that way. We actually write by mixing up letters. So what you really need to do is learn to connect letters together. But when we give people practice at writing them, we give mass practice. It turns out math practice is a great way to learn over the short term. You're usually better.

[05:05]

But space practice, in other words, taking all the different letters in this example and then mixing them up. So you practice one letter, then another letter, then a different letter, go back and forth. Same thing with math problems. Same thing with anything. It turns out to be slower to learn them. but it leads to much greater retention.

[05:26]

So to go, let me switch to mathematics. Suppose you're solving geometry problems. Well, typically, or you would have a chapter in the book, and here's one type of problem, and you practice that over and over, and you get really good at it. And then you have another chapter, another type of problem, You practice that over and over and get really good at it. But then when you come signed to the test, you're given these problems out of context. It's not in the context of, oh, here's the chapter on this type of problem.

[05:55]

Now I just do it. You first have to, when you have a test, you have to recognize what type of problem it is. And then you have to apply whatever the right rule is. But if you have mass practice, you never have practice at figuring out what type of problem is this, because you always know. You just read the chapter, you know it's this type of problem. And so one thing we find is that students, even when you show them that space practice and mixing problems up is better than studying them all together, it's so much easier to study them all together that people still prefer to do that.

[06:31]

So one of the things we're finding which when you state it as a general principle doesn't sound that surprising is that well when you make learning a bit harder, when you make students struggle while they're learning, that actually helps them in the long term. It hurts them in the short term, but it helps them in the long term. And we provide many examples of this in the book.

[06:53] Roddy Roediger:

Yeah, well, I was kind of laughing to myself as you shared that specific example, because I remember very vividly as a high school math student arguing with my teacher and saying, why are you asking us this question on this test? Because that's from the previous chapter. We don't have to know that anymore. And I think so much instruction is based on, you know, this unit, this topic, and then we're going to test and then we're going to move on. But as I think back on the more effective courses that I had, those using kind of a more spiral approach where there would be questions from every unit that we had gone through so far. And you'd have to kind of recognize, as you said, you know, what type of problem is this rather than simply apply that.

[07:31]

the algorithm of the day to the problem of the day, and then forget that and move on to something else.

[07:36] Roddy Roediger:

Exactly. I teach at the university level, of course, but I always give cumulative final exams, so the final exam makes you review everything in the course, and the idea is with that broad space practice, maybe the students will remember it better when they go on in their lives and can use the information.

[07:53] Roddy Roediger:

now dr rediger one thing you've uncovered in your research is some specific information about how memory is encoded and i think in the the last couple of decades in schools we've tried to get away from so much testing within the curriculum you know we have all these high stakes tests that we give and as compassionate educators we don't want to over test students so we've kind of pulled back from uh you know what might have you know what perhaps once upon a time was a more consistent and heavy testing regimen within a curriculum. What does your research tell us about testing and memory?

[08:26] Roddy Roediger:

Well, what we find is that actually testing, or as I prefer to call it, retrieval practice, can actually be very helpful.

[08:38]

Let me just describe a simple experiment that you have people read a passage and These were college students in our case, but we've done it with high school students and middle school students too. And then after reading the passage, they either take a quiz on it, so they have to answer questions about it, or they get to do what they normally do to study, and that is they reread the passage again. When we ask students, how do you typically study, they say they highlight, they underline, they reread. So we gave either practice quizzing or practice rereading to see which would be more effective. And what we find, at least on delayed tests, is that taking tests leads to greater long-term retention than just restudying. And people find that counterintuitive.

[09:29]

People think of tests as just measuring instruments. It's kind of like you just give the test to see what a person knows. But every time you answer a question, it changes your knowledge about the topic. And so what we find is called the retrieval practice effect, sometimes called the testing effect, that one of the best ways to remember things in the long term is to practice retrieving it. So people ask me, well, why does that happen? Give me a neural explanation.

[09:58]

Well, we're not there yet. But the examples I use is that what education often focuses on in our techniques is trying to get information into the student's mind. It's as though we present something in lecture, we have them read it, and the assumption is that if it's in their mind, they will use it. Well, what retrieval practice does is to say, Yes, having it in your mind is one thing, but what you really need to do is to be able to use it when you need it. That's part of active learning, that when you need a critical factor, if you're writing an essay and you have to call up a number of facts, you need to have them at your mental fingertips, as it were. And so to do that, you need to practice retrieving them, to pull them out of mind when you need them.

[10:42]

And so we actually find that we use, we recommend in classrooms, very low stakes quizzes or no stakes. That is, they don't even have to count for a grade. So in our work in Columbia Middle School, a school near St. Louis in Columbia, Illinois, What we did was to have students take the courses. We had research assistants in there that teachers would leave during each period, and then we would quiz certain facts. Sometimes we'd quiz them three times over a series of days, sometimes once, sometimes not at all.

[11:17]

In other words, they just kept the usual instructions. and reading the teacher provided, and the students provide for themselves. And what we found that was with more retrieval practice, the students would remember the information that was practiced better on chapter exams, better on end-of-semester exams, and in a few of our studies, even at the end of the school year. So stuff they learned in October was better remembered in May if they practiced retrieval in October just two or three times. And so retrieval practice, is quite effective. And just to give you more, another folks example, when I ask people, well, what do you remember about your early childhood?

[11:59]

And they tell me, and I say, have you ever thought of those things before? And they say, yes. And I say, well, that's kind of it. What we remember from childhood is the things we've been reminded of and retrieved over and over again. That's the secret to long-term memory. If you want to keep something, keep practicing its retrieval.

[12:16]

That's how you keep it accessible and usable when you need it.

[12:20] Roddy Roediger:

So Dr. Rettiger, based on your research, if you had your way, what's one thing that you would like every school leader to do based on what you've learned?

[12:29] Roddy Roediger:

Well, I think for school leaders, They are worrying these days, I know, from talking to people about active learning and trying to make students be part and parcel of their own learning, to take command. And although it sounds, again, somewhat counterintuitive, I think one way of doing that is encouraging students to quiz themselves as part of their homework assignments, to Actively be engaged in the material. Don't just let your eyes stare at the page. But while you're reading, for example, be active. Generate questions that you could ask yourself later while you're reading. Then self-test.

[13:08]

to prepare. Because that's really what this is all about, is elaborating while you're learning, and then trying to retrieve the information later. That's what you'll need to do on a test, and that's what you'll need to do in later life. And so, just to give you my own history in college teaching, I've taught introductory psychology for many years. I used to be, I'd give one or two tests during the semester, and then give a cumulative final exam. and that's okay.

[13:39]

That's what a lot of college education is, but now when I teach undergraduate courses, I give a quiz every class period. It's very low stakes. It doesn't count for much, but what it does is the students read, they pay attention to the lecture, and then they take the little quiz at the end. They usually do well, but it provides, instead of my giving two or three big tests that count for a whole lot and produce anxiety, I give a lot of little quizzes as well as the big ones. But then people are prepared for them. They read, they're engaged, they keep up.

[14:15]

The class discussion is better because the students are reading. And also, by the way, since I quiz them, they show up to class. That's not as much of a problem in middle school or high school or elementary school when the students are usually there. But most adults listening to this will remember they didn't always go to class in college. And so this also encourages the indirect communication. benefits of constant assessment are just more engagement, more thought, more reading, and more discussion.

[14:44]

So for me, it's worked. My classes, I think, have gotten better. The students, it's kind of a shock to them at first at the college level to be given a quiz or an assignment every day of class. It's kind of a shock to me, too, to be grading all these things. But I think it produces much more effective learning in the long term.

[15:01] Roddy Roediger:

And if I were to recall one course above all others that I took in college, it would be the botany class that I took my freshman year. And not only because it's the class where I met my now wife, also because it was a class where we did have a quiz every day. And by reviewing the material we had learned the day before And needing to study that with a study partner, my life was changed forever in some ways that maybe the instructor didn't intend, but certainly that made the learning stick. And one thing that your book is making me think about that would have made that even better was that kind of rehearsal over time when you're almost at the point of forgetting. Because one thing that I think wasn't ideal about the setup we had was all of the information that we were being quizzed on was very fresh, and in a couple of weeks we would have moved on from that and not really be talking about that anymore.

[15:54]

So in your book you talk about the importance of kind of almost forgetting. Could you describe that for us a little bit?

[16:00] Roddy Roediger:

Yes. Again, it's a little bit counterintuitive, but the best time to restudy something is when you've almost forgotten it. the longer the delay between first presentation and the second presentation, up to some limit, but much longer than most of us would even think about is that limit, is better. This is, again, seems counterintuitive. I often ask to switch topics just slightly. If you watch advertisements on TV, sometimes you'll see they're tremendously expensive to air, say, during the Super Bowl.

[16:34]

But often you'll see the same ad run almost back to back. You'll see the ad... There'll maybe be another ad or two. And then in the same little minute and a half time block, the same ad is presented again.

[16:45]

And I asked somebody who taught marketing one time, why do people do that? Why do they present the same ad in the same time block? And he said, oh, we've had this theory that the most effective time to present, you know, if you've already got a strong memory, you've just presented the ad, the best time to really hit it again is right after you've studied it. And I thought, well, interesting idea. It just turns out to be exactly wrong. What you really want to do is to present the thing, then let time go by, ideally a lot of time, and then hit it again.

[17:19]

Because that's spaced practice is when you get the most bang for your buck. And so again, it's the opposite of cramming. It's spacing things out is the best way to learn them. You get a much more complete encoding the second time if there's a long delay after the first time than if you do it immediately.

[17:41] Roddy Roediger:

Well, that is such an important insight. So the book is Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Rediger, and Mark McDaniel. Professor Rediger, thank you so much for joining us on Principal Center Radio. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

[17:56] Justin Baeder:

And now, Justin Baeder on high-performance instructional leadership.

[18:00] Roddy Roediger:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my interview with Professor Rettiger? One application of his research on memory and learning for me is around professional development. I think just as in the classroom, we often tend to focus intensively on a topic specifically during a narrow period of time and kind of strive for mastery in that kind of unit and chapter approach. I think we do the same thing in professional development when we bring someone in or we have a current emphasis in our district and we do a lot of professional development and help people hopefully make gains very quickly. But often we don't get those long-term changes. We don't see those long-term changes in practice like we hope.

[18:41]

And I think Professor Rediger's research and his book shed some light on that particular dynamic. If we focus intensively in a very short period of time on helping people develop new skills and apply new learning, it's very likely that they're going to move on to the next thing and kind of forget what they've learned. And we hear complaints about that all the time, about the constant churn of initiatives and new programs and new professional development, and we don't revisit what we've done in the past to really make it stick. So I would encourage you to check out Professor Rediger's book with Peter C. Brown and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning, and see what implications it has for not only your students, but your staff and their professional learning.

[19:29] Announcer:

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