Link to episode HERE.

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Henry Roediger: professor, cognitive psychologist, and co-author of the book that changed how the world learns: Make It Stick.

This conversation is a deep dive into the science of memory, why struggling is the secret ingredient to retention, and how decades of research are finally being used to transform schools, businesses, and individual lives.

Whether you’re memorizing a wine list, studying anatomy, or just trying to stop forgetting everything you read—this episode will change how you learn, forever.

Expect to Learn:

• • Why re-reading and highlighting are not learning.
  • The one technique that improves memory faster than anything else.
  • Why struggle and failure actually accelerate learning.
  • How Make It Stick became required reading at Harvard Medical School.
  • How memory works at the personal and collective level.
  • What servers and med students surprisingly have in common.
  • How Dr. Roediger uses his own research in everyday life (including remembering movies).
  • The upcoming sequel: Make It Work and why it matters now more than ever

Links: ⁠⁠

⁠Make It Stick⁠⁠ ⁠

⁠⁠⁠More on Dr. Roediger’s research⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠

⁠The James S. McDonnell Foundation⁠⁠⁠

Service starts now.

I talk to people in and around the service industry space, and people that I wish I could have heard from when I was coming up in restaurants. Altogether I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess of a life, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. You can find more of my work at⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠my blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and all my social links are at the bottom of that page.

Classic Episodes You May Like:

-#3:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My 1st and Most Powerful Conversation with Shane Alexander⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-#10:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Nat Harry, cocktail expert!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-#14: ⁠Dr. Shalini Bahl, mindful marketing⁠

As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.

Cheers

 All right. Thanks for joining us today. Today I’ve got Dr. Roddy Rodinger talking to us here. So you may not know this. We didn’t get a chance to talk about this before, but I am a huge fan of Make It Stick. So I did want to ask, how did that project come about and maybe just tell the listener a little bit about you and the work you’ve done. Sure. The project came about Mark McDaniel and our colleagues here back in the 30s after this of the book and we had been doing research together along with Kathleen McGurkett and a few other people for many years on applying cognitive psychology to education supported by the James S. McDaniel Foundation here in St. Louis. He founded McDaniel Aircraft, which became McDaniel’s regular, which became by and so that’s where the funding came from, very generous foundations supporting educational research. And so Mark and I had been making what we thought were really interesting discoveries along with our colleagues and Mark kept telling me we all write a book about it and I kept telling Mark, Mark, if you and I write a book about it, it might be in academics and people might not understand what we’re saying. It might not have as a widening impact as we would like it to, but we need as a professional writer. And so we thought about that and it occurred to me I have a professional writer in my family. Peter Brown is my brother-in-law, my sister’s Ellen Brown, and so he had written both fiction and nonfiction work and he’s built his life and business, very different background. He’d been an English major, didn’t know much about psychology, and so I approached him and he seemed wary of the idea because it was kind of outside his real house, but we kept talking and finally he agreed that we would, he would do it. And so he became a partner in this and we met in San Diego after a meeting, a professional me, and then we sat there for two days and kind of mapped out a first, not draft, but at least organizational chart of the book and then we fleshed it out and then we began working in Earth. In the meantime, I was invited to Harvard to give a talk for a new institute they had in improving undergraduate education and in the audience happened to be an editor from Harvard University Press and she came up and asked after words, I gave a 15-minute talk on my work and she came up and said that’s really interesting, you’ve never thought about writing a book about it. And I said well, as a matter of fact, we have, we hadn’t made any progress at all, I’m thinking about getting a publisher yet. And so we began talks with her too and sent her our outline and she has some really good comments on it. And so we eventually signed with Harvard University Press for the book. So that’s, and then we began writing in Earth that Mark and I would try to kind of draft out some reports and say so we wanted to include, figure out how to find energy people and find stories that were appropriate for the different chapters. And so it was a joy effort. I mean, he wrote drafts, sometimes he was a little exuberant and made claims a little bit beyond what the data supported. So we had to rework anyway, everything was a collaboration among the three of us, we must have read each chapter by time to piece and worked on all the chapters together. So that’s a long-winded way of telling you how the book began. No, that’s perfect. Yeah. And as far as I know, this is the first book kind of of its kind. Just to give you a little of my background, I went through the world of wine Somalia certifications. So working on my advanced Somalia certification, this is a podcast that’s geared more to servers and bartenders in the restaurant industry. But I looked for a while to kind of find something that could help me because it’s such a sheer amount of information to memorize. And your book when it came up a couple years ago was the first that I really found. I think there are a couple more now, but really it’s kind of groundbreaking. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of books on improving memory from one point of view or another, some based more on science than others are. Most of them had to do with mnemonic devices. These techniques, we mentioned them in the book, but they’re not a key part of our book, like there are many other books. So and these techniques are pretty hard to learn. And we wanted people to use low hanging fruit, these are things anybody can do this without going through a lot of training. Most of the things we suggest. Yeah. Well, it was definitely the first book I found that actually, you know, kind of made it okay to, you know, that disconnect between it doesn’t feel like you’re improving, like learning isn’t necessarily something that’s pleasant. Like I forget how exactly that’s put, but when you struggle. Designable, with the culture. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, was a big unlock for me because me, like most other people, I would just reread or highlight and do that sort of thing. But to really understand that even though I feel like I’m not progressing and I feel like I’m struggling, that that is learning itself almost, you know. Yeah. Well, we recommend the first one of the techniques we recommend in the book is using retrieval practice. And I think that’s one of the key elements of the book. But it’s also something even though it seems obvious after you learn about it, it wasn’t obvious to many people before. So the idea of testing yourself and keep just testing yourself, it not only improves what you know. I mean, when you recall it, when you even if you fail to recall it, and you give yourself feedback on the right answer, then that improves you in several different ways. And also when you test yourself, it lets you know what you don’t know, what you need to work on. And so a lot of people use the technique of space retrieval practice where they I don’t know anything about wine. I mean, the average person does so I can’t use an example for neural, but but you test yourself on something. So you’re pretty good. I was just in early for two weeks. So so you’re trying to learn Tuscan wines. That’s where I was spending my time. And there are so many different wines that are just dizzying just to me. And so trying to learn those and remember those, you should use retrieval practice for that. And so just study them over and over and hoping you get it. And that way if you use retrieval practice, you you benefit yourself for the ones you know, and you indicate gaps in your knowledge for the ones you don’t know. And so that tells you where you need to go back and study again. Sure. Yeah. Now, and I’m glad that you mentioned the space repetition. I was going to ask with some of the the products, I don’t think it was ever mentioned. I don’t know if it was around when the book came out, but like the on key of the world or like those automated space repetition things, would you recommend using those sort of things or? Yeah, I think they are good. Most people send me new things they developed all the time. Like I owe people about three emails, three different people email saying, because they said here’s my product. And would you please look at it? I just don’t have time to look at everything yet. But most of them, you know, if they read the book, they build in a computer program that’s very useful. So here would be one example, not particularly particular product here. Some people charge money for them, others are available for free. Most people are now charging. But if you say test yourself, let’s take capital rules of the state. So if you picked say Virginia, you say what’s the capital of Virginia, you say can say can finally you say Richmond, but with low confidence. Could be Alexandria, could be something else. And so you’ve got low confidence. So if you’ve got low confidence, you should first look at the answer. It is Richmond. And then your confidence will go up. But you still say to low confidence, you should test yourself again, not too far in the future. Just a few days in the future. But you should not miss those very high confidence, like I’m from Virginia. So I use Richmond. I grew up in Virginia. And so, you know, I can put that one off far in the future, because I know I know it. But other states I have more trouble with, not number wise, these repeatedly for classroom purposes, mostly. And but some Idaho, I think is Boise, but that would be low confidence. And so you, you test yourself depending on how much confidence you have in your answer. And if you’re right, always give yourself feedback, even if you’re pretty sure. I mean, sometimes there’s these illusions people have when you ask Americans, what’s the capital of Australia? Most people will say Sydney. And mostly with pretty high confidence too. But that’s not right. And so we have this high confidence and more use response. So I think confidence is a big part of this that you can test yourself further and further in the future, the more confidence you have. But based on your practice is a really good way to remember this type of information. Medical students use it all the time. They’re faced with the same kind of problem you’re the first couple of years of medical school, or just massive amounts of memorization, you just have to know the muscles of the body and the bones of the body and the nervous system and all the other bodily systems. So you’ve got a tremendous amount of information to learn. And many people usually should practice. Yeah, I think that’s an interesting kind of piece to pick at the confidence of your knowledge of the element. Because if you look at the difference between say, your wine studies and a medical student, I think wine studies, I may be unsure about the blending grapes in San Giovese, the exact percentages, but medical students, if they’re unsure, they could actually lead to pretty dire consequences. So certainty and confidence becomes higher barred across. I think the capitals example was great too, because I can guarantee you with 100% accuracy that I have not thought of the capital of Virginia since I was probably 10 years old. And I still in my head thought, I think it’s Richmond. So it is amazing to see that the decay curve of that knowledge at least lasted me up to that. I wouldn’t have bet money on it, but it’s stuck in there, whatever they did in elementary school carried on. That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. But do I try and remember this? No, no, I was there’s there’s no stock that I ever put knowing that information. Yeah. What how did you get interested in like memory and learning originally? Well, I had just I think growing up and going to school and I, you know, just and some people retain the information, see me they easily or well, and other people not being able to do that so easily and well. And I wondered, is it the strategies people use to remember or is it their inability, their intelligence, whatever that nebulous concept means. And we kind of all know what it means, but we will come to school, but that kind of verbal intelligence at least, verbal mathematical intelligence that we need in school. So I somehow just kind of interested and then when I got to college, I discovered there was a whole field that studies this kind of thing. So I had personal experiences, I wondered why I can my mother died when I was young. And I could discover I could remember her, I can see her events of our lives together by mentally thinking about them. And that was today because of the drill practice, but actually, that’s not why I started studying the drill practice. So I just got interested in the very young age and then just kept pursuing that interest. It went out of the baseball since I never, I played an awful lot of baseball and I never got much better after, you know, in high school, I played all four years and don’t think I was much better in my senior year than I was my freshman year. So decided that probably wasn’t a good future for me. Yeah, yeah, that’s that. Those are long shots to say the least. Most people don’t recognize it back then. I recognize it back then. Well, so just so I know, because, you know, I believe the lifestyle of a professor, the doctor, like, what does your kind of day to day job look like? What is it that you do really? Okay, well, let’s say now it’s summer, so I’m mostly writing and doing research, but I’m also retiring June 30th. But to give you a typical day for my past life, if I would typically get up going to my office, if I have a class that day, which I usually do, I will spend time looking at my notes, updating them, maybe looking at all my PowerPoint slides for that day and making sure that they’re up to date, and then dropping a few, maybe adding a few. And so I can prepare for classes as part of the day, then going and actually teaching the class for typically an hour or 20 minutes, if it’s a, depending on what day is the week I’m teaching, if it’s a Tuesday, Thursday classes, an hour and 20 minutes, if it’s a Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes, 15 minutes, a period. And so then I kind of decompress after teaching, takes me a half hour or so. You get too well-dropped when you teach, that least for me, you’re on stage, essentially. Exactly, yeah, you’re on stage and depending on the course I’m teaching, it can be a stage for many people or a stage if it’s a graduate similar or maybe 10 to 15 people. So anyway, it takes me a while to cool down so usually I’ll just email or something after that and kind of calm down. Then I’ll have committee meetings during the day, depending on what committees I’m on that semester. I’ll probably have meetings with my graduate students and office hours with my undergraduate students and then the meetings with graduate students often go on for a while. Once a week, we have a lab meeting with my students and we discuss either a paper somebody is working on or maybe a paper that I’m reviewing or whatever happens to be the topic of the day. So the day goes by quickly and I usually try to work out until late afternoon and then often I work an hour or two in the evenings too. So that’s a typical day, I would say. But I was fully a professor, which I’m kind of phasing out like now. Well, congratulations, that’s a milestone. Yeah, retirement coming soon. That’s awesome. I did want to ask you before I forgot to, with all the new technologies that are coming out with AI, now with the prevalence of cell phones, everyone’s got one in their pockets, do you think that there are any long-term effects or any effects on learning and memory that you’ve seen from that sort of shifted the technology and things available? I think it’s too early to say yet. It’s just a moving target. It’s so new still. AI, I think, last time I taught a freshman in Syracuse Introduction to Memory Studies with a friend of mine, Jim Merch, who was in the anthropology department and I taught about individual memory, like we make it sicker about how we learn better and topics like eyewitness memory and so forth. And he would teach about collective memory, memory for us in groups, how I re-identify with all kinds of groups from our family to our schools, to our sports teams, what have you. And so you can look at memory for all of those. Here I do research together, we tend to look at national memories. People remember, say, the last election. People remember World War II, that kind of thing. I mean, remember that in the collective sense that we, I did experience World War II, but we have memories that we picked up from school, from movies, from media. So we have knowledge of their memories of ancient art. We should probably tell the story of World War II. Anyway, I’m about to go down that rabbit hole, so I will pull back, since that’s not really what the conversation’s about today. No, no, no. I mean, yeah, that sounds fascinating. I was going to ask what you were going to and focusing on nowadays. So that’s actually perfect. Yeah. Two things. I’m hoping this summer to write up some papers that I hadn’t had chance to write up while I was full-time. So that’s one thing. I am with Mark McDaniel and Peter Brown, but we’re starting on a second book that we’re going to call Make It Work. And it’s basically how people have used Make It Stick, both individually, like you’re doing. You discovered it somehow, and now you’re using it in your courses. And then how institutions have used it. For example, the medical students at Harvard Medical School, their curriculum is now based on Make It Stick. And when we interviewed the Dean of the Medical Center at Harvard and two of his associate deans, I guess it was two summers ago now, and they showed us the slide deck that they used when they introduced new medical students in Make It Stick, and slides through the picture of the cover and then how they recommend reading it. So that’s one example that will be a chapter of the book. And other medical schools do it, not the same thing, but similar things. And so we’re finding cases where people have used it, because we often get these questions, well, I read Make It Stick, but here I am, you know, chair of the English department at my college, how do I use it for English in my setting? And well, we can’t, we don’t know their setting, but here’s somebody who’s figuring it out. We actually don’t have anything about English in the book, so I shouldn’t have used that as an example, but we have many other topics. And some in academia, some in the world of training, every business has a training routine, and often they have a, you know, somebody who’s in big corporations, somebody who leaves training, and they’re always interested in training people better. And so if you’ve got a store among the science and the advisory board of several different companies, and they sometimes will use Make It Stick, or principles from Make It Stick, to help train their customers, I mean, I’m sorry, their salespeople. So for example, if you work for New Balance shoe stores, and New Balance shoe stores everywhere, turnover is very heavy, and people don’t necessarily want to make their career selling shoes. And so they, you know, people do it for a while, and they move on to something else often. And so they have new training all the time, how do you learn all these shoes and their dimensions, and what’s best for people with flat feet, and what’s best for people for high arches, and what’s best for running, what’s best for walking, and so forth. And it’s really important for those of us, through the customers, but they, I’m sorry, I’m being interrupted from the back. Oh, that’s okay. Yeah. You need to edit this out. Can we pause for just one second? Oh, absolutely. Okay, let me just go, I’ve got cleaning ladies here. Oh, sure. Hello? Hi, I’m in my office. Listen, I can’t. I’m in my office now. Okay, so I’ll be around until 11 o’clock. Sorry, I told them I was going to be occupied, but they were calling my name and trying to find me. No, that’s fine. That’s fine. I’d love to go out of life for them, so I wouldn’t have to see them. But okay, well, straight back up, ask me a question again. Well, I was going to jump in, you know, you were talking about different organizations that have used Make It Stick and found different ways. And actually, in our organization, we do a similar thing. So I’m a general manager by day of a steakhouse restaurant. So our training, we space it out over two weeks, days on and off to just have that space repetition. They start with one big test of the food menu. And then every shift after that, we call it rapid fire quizzing. But we just ask them random questions to make sure that they’re still pulling that information, find where they’re strong and weak and then hit that for the night. But you know, that’s great. My computer and I might want to review. Oh, yeah, I’m available. You got my contacts. But no, it’s yeah, I did want to ask, you know, going back and also, I wanted to make sure I got that for sure. It’s called Make It Work. Well, that’s the thing that’s in there. I mean, Make It Stick was like the not the title of the authors had in mind, but the company gets the final word on what the title is. Got it. Yeah. So anyway, I like the title a lot, but there’s not one I came up with. So Make It Work may or may not be the final sign. Fair enough. Yeah. I did want to ask you before the end of today, if you had the chance to go back and redo the book, Make It Stick, is there anything you would have done differently, added in or taken out? That’s an interesting question. I think everything we said, I mean, I have to go through the both pages, which I will do. Sure. I think the page should really sink. But there’s no big omissions or errors in the book. I mean, there might be omissions, you can always add more and more stuff. But there’s nothing major we would change, I think, today. That’s true. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was just curious. You never know. That’s a good question. The book’s 11 years old now, but still selling very well. New people want to find here. I think that’s a testament to what you did there. Besides the recall, and I’m trying to remember in my head going through its spaced repetition, I forget the word for it, were you mixed in interleaving? Interleaving, yeah. That’s very important for certain types of information for sure. Especially in, especially useful in mathematics and learning, because almost always mathematics is taught in a black fashion, where you learn a problem, and then you do two of them, so you can do that problem, then you move on to the next problem, so forth and so on. But you always know what type of problem it is when you’re solving it. You know the four in those, so just applying it. But when you have a test, you’ve got, say, 10 different types of problems you’ve learned, and now you get you’re all mixed up. So a critical part of this is being able to recognize what type of problem is this, so you can call up the right form. Or sometimes a teacher will give you, say, the 10 four in those on the side, but you still got to pick, so you don’t have to memorize those. You still have to pick out the right one. And if you use black practice, you’ve never had practice of doing that, because you’ve always known what it is. But if you use mixed up practice, where you’re getting all 100 kinds of problems, it slows down learning. But you retain much better and you learn much better on the test. So it’s a perfect example, in the leading, and a perfect example of what Robert and Elizabeth B. Ort call a desirable difficulty, where learning isn’t made more difficult by living than by blocking, but you remember and retain much better than you saw problems on the test. Yeah, it’s almost like you like that’s the way that you learn discernment maybe or like judgment. Is that to going too far and saying that? Say what you mean. I’m trying to sort of summarize in an easy phrase, your example of the mathematics students, you know, you spend a week learning how to find the area of this shape and this shape and this shape. But if you don’t mix in the different shapes, you won’t have the judgment and test day to pick the right formula. Yeah. Judging or discrimination, what type of problem is it I’m looking at? I might even say it’s almost like a way of, I think in the book, I’m not going to get the quote exactly right, but there’s a quote I’ve loved for a long time. And I think about it when I’m teaching wine to the servers too, where it’s something like the students think that the grammatical sentence construction is like what the answer is, whereas like you’re not getting the whole thing, you’re just becoming more fluent and more fluent with the information as you go over it. But you’re not really seeing the core of why the answer is the answer. Right. Yeah. Now, when you read something repeatedly, you become quite fluent and your eyes go over the page, you think I’ve got this, I’ve got this, I’ve got this, but you may or may not have it. You don’t know until you’ve tested. One thing I suggest in reading textbooks is that students will just say read a section of the book. You know, often book textbooks or they have some sections in the chapters. So a section might be two pages. And, you know, at the end of that section, just close your eyes and close the book and try to repeat to yourself in your own words what you just read. Not, not repeat exactly like you read. You can’t do that anyway, probably, but repeat to yourself. And that helps so much that your initial retrieval practice of that information. And just doing that is extraordinarily helpful. Just to give you an example, I had a friend who said, I never can remember movies, you know, come out and I’ll watch it and I’ll understand it. And then two weeks later, come up in conversation with his wife and he were having dinner and he would say, nothing comes back to me. And I said, well, after you’ve watched the movie, I said, if you’ve already seen it with your wife, you can’t tell her about it. She’ll be bored. But what you can do is at least mentally tell it to yourself. Now, over the movie, like you would that section of the book, and tell yourself, just think of the beginning, the middle, and then the end. And you’ll have a scaffold on which to hang your memories later, visual of practice retrieval for the key parts of the movie. There’s usually introductions to the characters, then there’s some critical turning point, and then there’s some resolution to that at the end of the movie. We’ve been bad. And so if you just do that, you’ll remember the movie later. And he told me later on, yeah, that works pretty well. That’s a perfect example. This book is one of the reasons that I have told countless people that, learning and memory is not repeated exposure, it’s repeated recall. And if you don’t recall it, you don’t get it. I think that it’s your book. I think that this is where I first was introduced to the Penny experiment. We’re trying to figure out like picture, I forget how it is, but it’s like picture or penny, or is it there like a website with different? Yeah, there’s a famous study that simply asked people to recognize a penny and it gave all kinds of different orientations of Abraham Lincoln, different wordings. Anyway, the very few people started as a group above chance, but just barely. There were a couple of other tennies that looked almost like the real penny, and people often picked them instead of the real thing. And sometimes they just pick kind of wild things. Because we’ve never had, you know, we’ve seen a penny, it’s kind of like new repetition, you know. It’s very fluid to see a penny, you say, oh, that’s what it is. Of course, now we’re doing away with the penny. So that example won’t work. I don’t know how to reduce, but right now it works. I mean, even something as simple as is the president facing left or right on any of our dollar bills, any of our anything. I wouldn’t bet any large amount of money on that. Yeah, on some of them for sure. Well, awesome. You know, Dr. Rodinger, thank you so much for making the time today. I really appreciate it. That book has been a huge life’s in for me. There’s a large portion of my life where I would not have been able to remember any of this stuff that I had to be tested on without it. So I definitely recommend anyone listening, go get that book. You know, don’t get worried, recall a little bit of difficulty, we’ll make a world of difference in learning. And we’ve only talked about retrieval practice, but we discussed other aspects of memory in the other side of retrieval practice. Oh, sure. But yeah, no, it’s meaner world to me. And it was a pleasure to get a few moments of your time to talk to you today. And thank you. Yeah, good luck on retirement. Thank you. Yeah, I gotta come have one now that you retired. Yeah, yeah, I’ll never build Omaha. Yeah, most people just drive through. So thank you again.