Make It Stick

Much remains to be known about the processes that govern learning, but studies and research have clearly shown that certain traditional methods are far from effective. The application of cognitive psychology in education has led to new and important reflections on the topic that underline the need for change, especially in the approach. For example, most people believe that learning is somehow automatic, that it happens naturally after repeating a concept numerous times. They also think of learning as univocal and almost entirely passive, a simple transferal of knowledge from a teacher to a learner, or from a book to the mind of a reader. Nothing could be further from the truth: learning can only ever be active and is mainly based on unintuitive mechanisms, which enable connections to be made in the human brain that retrieve information quickly when it is needed. 

Another problem concerns difficulties in making judgements: evaluating what we already know can be hard because we tend to do this based on feelings rather than objective parametres. Effort and difficulties are seen as negative, but they are actually crucial to gaining deeper and more consolidated knowledge. 

It is also true that everyone has personal preferences when it comes to learning, because we all receive and process information differently: so each person needs to find their own strategy and develop their own method.