I’ll admit something up front. Before this course, I studied with a highlighter. I read a chapter, highlighted the important parts, reread my highlights, and felt ready. Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel took that habit apart in the first chapter. The authors say rereading and highlighting create a feeling of fluency, and that feeling is easy to mistake for actual learning. The things that really work, like retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and struggling with a problem before you’re shown how to solve it, feel slower and messier. Sometimes they feel like failing.
That’s where the gardener comes in. Every blunder plants a lesson. This post looks at whether the book’s own structure plants the lessons it teaches. Mostly it does. In a few places, I think it doesn’t.
Stories do the work of elaboration.
Each chapter opens with a real person instead of a research finding. Chapter 1 opens with a pilot whose training takes over when something goes wrong in the air. Chapter 2 opens with neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold, who replays his surgeries afterward and asks what he could do differently. Chapter 4 opens with Marine officer Mia Blundetto working through difficult training.
Make it Stick uses elaboration to help readers learn. The authors explain that we learn better when we connect new material to things we already know and build a mental model around it. A story gives the research something to attach to. Weeks later, I remember Ebersold thinking through a surgery on his drive home more clearly than I remember the studies in that chapter. That reflection habit is the “Tried / Learned” notebook in my header image: write down what you tried, then write down what it taught you.
The big ideas keep coming back.
Retrieval practice has its own chapter (Chapter 2), but it doesn’t stay there. It comes back in the chapters on varied practice, desirable difficulties, illusions of knowing, and again in the final chapter of tips. Spacing and interleaving work the same way. Each return puts the idea in a slightly different context.
That’s spaced and interleaved practice built into the reading. By Chapter 8, I wasn’t meeting retrieval practice for the first time. I was recognizing it, and I found myself predicting what the authors would recommend before they said it. That’s what retrieval is supposed to feel like.
It starts with what we get wrong.
The book doesn’t start with strategies. It starts with “Learning Is Misunderstood,” then later takes on illusions of knowing and the myth of learning styles. That order is deliberate. A reader has to let go of a comfortable belief before a new strategy makes sense. If the authors had led with “quiz yourself,” I would have nodded and kept highlighting. Showing me that my confidence was wrong was a small desirable difficulty of its own. It was uncomfortable, and it made the later chapters stick.
Where the structure falls short
This is where I’d push back.
There’s no retrieval built in. The book argues that testing yourself is one of the strongest learning tools we have, but it never asks the reader to stop and recall anything. There are no end-of-chapter questions and no “close the book and answer this” prompts. A reader can do exactly what the authors warn against: read, nod, feel fluent, and move on. In our course, the RPA quizzes fill that gap. My own routine is to retake older RPAs each week before opening anything new, and that’s when I find out what I actually know. The book alone wouldn’t have pushed me there.
The chapters are blocked, not interleaved. A book that argues for mixing up practice is organized one strategy per chapter. To be fair, a book has to be easy to navigate, and the recurring themes help. Still, the structure invites a reader to learn retrieval, then spacing, then interleaving, which is the blocked practice the authors say feels productive but fades faster.
That said, I understand why the authors built it this way. When I sang in an a cappella group, I learned the melody first and then my harmony part. I had to learn the choreography too, though I’ll admit I enjoyed the singing a lot more. My part didn’t make sense until I knew what it was harmonizing with. The hard part came later: holding my line while someone next to me sang the melody and my ear kept trying to follow them. That struggle is what made the part stick. The book’s structure works a bit like that. Each chapter gives you a piece of the model, and the recurring themes make you hold the pieces together. Even so, I think the book would be stronger if it pushed the reader into that harder stage sooner.
The answers come before the questions. The book makes a strong case for generation, which means trying to answer before you’re taught. Yet nearly every chapter hands over the conclusion first. Opening a chapter with a question, like “Why would mixing up practice slow you down now but help you later?”, would have let the reader struggle before the explanation arrived.
The summary invites rereading. Chapter 8 pulls everything together into practical tips for students, lifelong learners, teachers, and trainers. It’s the most useful chapter for applying the ideas, but a tidy summary is also the easiest thing to reread for that false sense of mastery. I would have liked it framed as prompts first and answers second.
What this means for my work
I design and lead change and adoption work at a Global Pharm company, and this critique changed how I think about training design. The book’s biggest structural gap is my biggest lesson: don’t leave retrieval up to the learner. If I build a job aid for HR hotline staff, for example, the strongest version won’t be a routing guide people read once. It will start with call scenarios they work through, get some wrong, and then check against the guide. Struggle first, answer second, and bring it back a week later.
The verdict
Make It Stick plants its seeds well. The stories, the recurring themes, and the decision to confront misconceptions first all reinforce what the authors teach. The watering, though, is left to the reader. The quizzing, the spacing out, and the deliberate wrong answers have to come from somewhere other than the page. The book convinced me that learning is supposed to feel like blundering. I wish it had made me blunder a little more while I was reading it.
Reference: Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Leave a Reply