Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel expose the most widespread learning fraud: rereading feels productive but produces almost nothing. At UCLA, Elizabeth and Robert Bjork documented "desirable difficulties"—the finding that struggle, not fluency, builds durable memory. From Matt Brown's engine failure over Texas to Michael Young's climb from bottom to top of his medical school class, the evidence is unambiguous: retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and interleaved training outperform every intuitive study method. Recognition is not recall; familiarity is not mastery.

You'll learn:

- Why forgetting between sessions strengthens long-term retention

- How the illusion of fluency deceives even veteran pilots

- What Timothy Fellows did differently to score 90-95% consistently