Chapter 5 Exercises: What Makes Learning Stick

These exercises ask you to do real learning in different ways and compare the results. They're designed to make the abstract research findings concrete through direct personal experience.

Exercise 5.1: The Dunlosky Audit — Rating Your Current Technique Portfolio

Time required: 20–30 minutes Materials: Your notes or study materials from a current course or learning project

Part A: Inventory What You Currently Do

Go through your study materials from the past two weeks. For each study session you can remember, categorize the activities you engaged in using Dunlosky's ten techniques:

High utility: - Practice testing (flashcards, self-quizzing, practice exams, blank page recall) - Distributed practice (reviewing material across multiple days)

Moderate utility: - Elaborative interrogation (asking "why is this true?") - Self-explanation (explaining material to yourself) - Interleaved practice (mixing problem types)

Low utility: - Summarization (rewriting material in shorter form) - Highlighting/underlining - Keyword mnemonics - Imagery for text learning - Rereading

Estimate: what percentage of your total study time fell in each category? You don't need precision — ballpark estimates work.

Part B: The Efficiency Ratio

For each technique you used, estimate: - How much time you spent on it - How confident you feel in the material covered using that technique - (If you've been tested on material covered with different techniques) how well you performed

Now ask: is your confidence higher for material studied with high-utility techniques or low-utility ones? What does this suggest about your intuitions as a self-assessor?

Part C: The Pivot Plan

Identify the one change to your study approach that would shift the most time from low-utility to high-utility techniques. Be specific:

"I currently spend about 45 minutes per study session rereading my notes. I will replace 30 minutes of that rereading time with blank-page retrieval practice, closing my notes after each section and writing everything I can remember before checking."

Write your pivot plan down. Keep it somewhere visible. Implement it starting with your next study session.

Exercise 5.2: The Spacing Experiment

Time required: Two weeks (about 15 minutes of active work per day) Materials: Any vocabulary, definitions, formulas, or other factual items you're currently learning

This exercise runs over two weeks and gives you direct experience of the spacing effect.

Setup

Choose 30 items you need to learn — vocabulary words, biology terms, code syntax patterns, historical events with dates, whatever is most relevant to your current learning goals. If you don't have a current learning goal with discrete items, use vocabulary from a language you've always wanted to learn (try 30 common words in Spanish, French, Japanese, or whatever appeals).

Create simple flashcards: item on one side, answer on the other.

Week 1: The Massed Condition (10 items, massed study)

Take 10 of your items. Study them for 20 minutes in a single session. Go through all 10 cards multiple times in that session. Then don't look at them again until the test.

Week 1-2: The Spaced Condition (10 items, spaced study)

Take a different 10 items. Study them for 5 minutes on Day 1, 5 minutes on Day 3, 5 minutes on Day 7, and 5 minutes on Day 12. Each time, use retrieval practice — try to produce the answer before checking. Total study time: approximately the same 20 minutes, spread over 12 days.

Week 2: The Interleaved Spaced Condition (10 items)

Take the final 10 items. Study them for 5 minutes on Day 2, 5 minutes on Day 5, 5 minutes on Day 10, and 5 minutes on Day 14. Mix these items with your spaced condition items during each session rather than keeping them separate.

Day 14: The Test

Test yourself on all 30 items. Don't look at any of the cards — just write down as many answers as you can. Score each group.

Analysis

Compare your scores across three conditions: - Massed (10 items, studied in one session) - Spaced (10 items, studied across four sessions) - Interleaved spaced (10 items, studied across four sessions mixed with other material)

What do you find? Most people find the spaced conditions outperform the massed condition, sometimes substantially. The difference in total study time was minimal; the difference in results was not.

Reflection: - How did the massed studying feel compared to the spaced studying? - Did the massed studying feel more productive? Why? - What would it mean for your regular study habits if you had to redesign around spacing rather than cramming?

Exercise 5.3: Designing an Interleaved Practice Set

Time required: 30–45 minutes Materials: A subject where you have multiple problem types or technique types to practice

Most students study new material in blocks: all of Technique A, then all of Technique B, then all of Technique C. This exercise asks you to design an interleaved set instead.

Step 1: Identify Your Problem Types

Choose a subject where you're currently practicing problem-solving — mathematics, programming, language grammar, music theory, chess tactics, anything with distinct problem types. List the problem types you need to practice. Be specific: not just "calculus" but "derivative using chain rule, derivative using product rule, derivative using quotient rule, finding critical points, optimization problems."

Step 2: Design the Blocked Version

Write out what a typical 45-minute blocked practice session would look like for this material. How many problems of Type A? Then Type B? Then Type C? This is probably roughly what you've been doing.

Step 3: Design the Interleaved Version

Now redesign the same practice set for interleaved practice. Mix the problem types randomly. Problem 1 might be Type C, Problem 2 Type A, Problem 3 Type A, Problem 4 Type B, etc. You can use a random number generator or just shuffle.

Key difference: in the interleaved version, before starting each problem, you have to identify what TYPE of problem it is and which approach to use. Add this as an explicit step: "Before I solve this problem, I will determine what technique or approach it requires."

Step 4: Run Both Versions

Do the blocked version first. Record how it felt and your performance.

Wait at least two days, then do the interleaved version on equivalent problems. Record how it felt (likely harder) and your performance during practice (likely lower).

Wait one week. Then take a mixed test on all the material you covered. Compare your performance.

Reflection Questions

  • How did the experience of blocked vs. interleaved practice differ?
  • Did you notice the identification step (figuring out which technique to use) in the interleaved condition? Did this feel challenging?
  • What do your test results suggest?
  • What would it mean to redesign your regular practice with interleaving built in?

Exercise 5.4: The Elaboration Chain

Time required: 20 minutes Materials: A topic you're currently studying

Choose one concept or fact from your current learning material. Something substantive — not a simple definition but an idea with real content. For example: the concept of natural selection, the definition of a linked list in computer science, the mechanism of a nucleophilic substitution reaction, the principle of comparative advantage in economics.

Write the concept down. Now generate answers to as many of these questions as possible about that concept:

  1. Why is this true? (What's the underlying mechanism or logic?)
  2. Why does this matter? (What would be different if this weren't true?)
  3. What is this an example of? (What broader category or principle does this illustrate?)
  4. What is this connected to in what I already know?
  5. What surprised me about this? (What did I expect to be true that was different?)
  6. What question does this raise that I still don't know the answer to?
  7. When would this fail or not apply? (What are the boundaries of this concept?)
  8. If I had to explain this to someone who has never studied this subject, what analogy would I use?
  9. What's the most important practical implication of this?
  10. What's the most common misunderstanding about this?

You won't have answers to all of these — that's fine. The unanswerable questions are the most valuable ones: they're pointing you exactly where your understanding is incomplete.

Reflection: After going through this process, how does your understanding of the concept feel different than it did before? Does the concept feel more connected to other things you know? If you were tested on this concept tomorrow, how would your performance compare to if you'd simply reread the definition?

Exercise 5.5: The Comparative Study Experiment

Time required: Two comparable study sessions, about 30 minutes each Setup: You need material you haven't studied yet — a chapter, a reading, something genuinely new

This is the most important exercise in the chapter. You're going to study the same amount of material in two different ways and compare your retention after one week.

Session A: Traditional Methods (30 minutes)

Study a section of material using your old approach. Read the material. Highlight important points. Perhaps reread the highlighted sections. Perhaps copy notes. Do what you've always done.

Session B: Evidence-Based Methods (30 minutes)

Study a comparable section of material. After each page or paragraph, stop and try to recall what you just read — on paper, from memory. Answer any review questions in the text before reading the answers. Make a quick diagram or concept map of the key relationships in the material.

One Week Later: The Test

Without looking at either set of notes, write down everything you can remember from Session A material. Then write down everything you can remember from Session B material. Count the distinct, accurate points you can retrieve from each.

What to look for: Most people find Session B material substantially better retained. The gap can be striking — 50% more retained is not unusual. What's particularly instructive is comparing this performance gap to your sense during the sessions of how productive each was.

If you don't find a meaningful gap, reflect carefully: were the materials truly equivalent in difficulty? Were you already very familiar with Session A material? Did fatigue affect Session B performance?

Reflection: Redefining Productive Studying

Before closing this chapter's exercises, write one paragraph responding to this question:

What does "productive studying" mean to you now, compared to what it meant before reading this chapter? Be specific about what's changed in your understanding — not just "I'll use retrieval practice" but why, and what you now believe about the relationship between effort, comfort, and learning.

Keep this paragraph. Revisit it in three months. See whether your behavior changed to match your beliefs.