“If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.” - Francis Bacon
The knowledge that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain sends chills up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one strategy of most people, including up to 90% of college students in some surveys, and is central to what we tell ourselves to do when we learn. Unfortunately, it has three strikes against it:
- It takes a long time.
- It doesn’t lead to durable learning.
- It creates the illusion of knowing, where familiarity with the material is mistaken for mastery. When you have the book or your notes (or Google!) open right in front of your face, it’s easy to convince yourself that the knowledge is in your brain. But it’s not.
In order to learn well, you must retrieve (that right there is the single most important lesson in this book). This is true for anything the brain is being asked to remember and call up again in the future—facts, complex concepts, theories, and problem-solving techniques.
By attempting to recall material you are trying to learn, you create robust new memories and strengthen existing ones. This produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily (and in more varied settings), and can be applied to a wider variety of problems. In practice, this means that as you’re learning you should test yourself on the information you’re absorbing. Even when you don’t know something entirely, it’s better to try and reproduce from memory than to give up early and look at the answer. Active recall is always better than passive repetition. Sure, it’s more difficult, but it’s undeniably more effective.