Better learning strategies

I've just finished reading a book about effective learning strategies. It has a lot of relevance for a chess player.

The book is "Make It Stick" by Brown et al. Here are a few of their findings that caught my attention.

1. Cramming is no good because it only works the short-term memory, and almost nothing is remembered afterwards.

2. Spaced retrieval (flashcards etc) effectively imprints knowledge in the long-term memory.

3. Retrieval practice is a more powerful learning strategy than repeated review and rereading.

4. Learning needs to be mixed up, not too narrow and repetitive. This applies to both motor skills and cognitive tasks. This is directly relevant to chess.

Example A) Motor Skills. A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids (Group A) tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half (Group B) mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket.

Question: which group scored best? Surely Group A were the masters of the three-foot beanbag throw? Wrong!

The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets.It's counter-intuitive, but it has to do with how the brain approaches a learning task.

I'll continue with this post if people show an interest in this topic. Let me know.