Chapter 1: Further Reading

These are the sources that underpin Chapter 1, with notes on what each offers and who should read it.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

This is the essential paper — the comprehensive review that examined ten common study strategies against the full body of research evidence. The authors assessed each strategy's utility across five variables: generalizability across subjects, learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Retrieval practice and spaced practice emerged as the clear winners. If you want to understand the evidentiary foundation for this entire book, this is where to start. It's a dense academic paper, but the executive summary and the strategy-by-strategy breakdowns are accessible to non-specialists. Free to access through most university libraries.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard University Press.

The most accessible book-length treatment of the learning science literature for general readers. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel are all serious researchers, and Make It Stick translates their findings — and those of collaborators — into vivid, story-driven prose. The chapters on retrieval practice, spaced practice, and interleaving are excellent. The book is particularly strong on the counterintuitive nature of effective learning (why difficulty is desirable, why fluency is misleading). A natural companion to this book for anyone who wants more depth on the research.

Carey, B. (2014). How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens. Random House.

Science journalist Benedict Carey brings an investigator's perspective to learning research, diving into the history of the field and the often-surprising experiments that produced the key findings. His treatment of the spacing effect, the role of context in memory, and the benefits of studying in varied environments is particularly good. The book is highly readable — closer to narrative nonfiction than textbook — and is an excellent choice if you want the science told as a set of fascinating stories rather than as a systematic review.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.

This is one of the landmark papers on retrieval practice — the study that helped catalyze the modern research program on "the testing effect." Roediger and Karpicke showed that students who were tested on material retained significantly more a week later than students who restudied it, even when the restudying students had spent more time with the material. The finding is striking both for its clarity and for the way it overturns the intuition that more exposure equals more learning. Available through most academic libraries and worth reading even if you're not accustomed to reading research papers.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Jossey-Bass.

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham writes with rare clarity about the science of learning and memory and what it means for education. The book is technically aimed at teachers, but it's equally valuable for students who want to understand their own cognitive architecture. Particularly useful for its treatment of the relationship between factual knowledge and critical thinking (you can't think deeply about what you don't know), the role of working memory in learning, and why practice matters more than talent. Willingham's broader writing — including his "Ask the Cognitive Scientist" column — is worth following.