How to Apply Make It Stick: Turn the Science of Learning Into a Reading System

The Book That Tells You to Stop Highlighting

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning came out in 2014 from Harvard University Press. Two of its three authors, Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel, are cognitive psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis who spent careers studying memory. The third, Peter Brown, is a novelist who turned their research into prose you'd actually read on a train. That combination is why the book outlived the genre.

The uncomfortable part, if you're the kind of person who reads articles on a highlighting site, is what the book says about highlighting. It puts underlining, highlighting, and rereading near the bottom of the effectiveness ladder, right next to cramming. Those methods are popular precisely because they feel productive, and the book's whole project is to separate the feeling of learning from the fact of it.

We're not going to pretend that sting isn't there. Instead we're going to take it seriously, because the authors are right about the thing they're actually attacking, and understanding what that is turns out to be the key to using their research well. The target isn't the highlighter. It's what most people do after they put it down, which is nothing.

This article is a practical guide to running the book's findings as a daily habit. We'll keep the science honest, use examples the authors didn't write, and end with a workflow you can start today. If you want the original in full, and you should, buy the book. What follows is how to live it, not a substitute for reading it.

Why Easy Studying Feels Like Learning

Start with the trap, because every technique in the book is designed to escape it.

When you reread a chapter, the second pass goes faster and feels clearer. Your brain reads that fluency as a signal: I know this now. But fluency is about the text, not your memory. You've gotten better at recognizing the words on the page, which is a completely different skill from being able to produce the idea when the page isn't there. The book calls this the illusion of knowing, and it's the reason confident students bomb exams they felt ready for.

Highlighting has the same failure mode when it's passive. Dragging a yellow bar across a sentence marks it as important and gives a small hit of "handled." If marking is the entire transaction, almost nothing transfers to long-term memory. The 2013 review by John Dunlosky and colleagues in Psychological Science in the Public Interest graded ten common study techniques, and highlighting and rereading both landed in the "low utility" tier, for exactly this reason. Our piece on the science of highlighting digs into how to flip that, and the short version agrees with Make It Stick: marking is only step one.

Here's the reframe that makes the rest of the book click. Learning that feels hard is doing more work. When recall is effortful, when you have to reconstruct an idea instead of reread it, your brain treats the information as worth keeping. Robert Bjork named this family of effortful methods "desirable difficulties." The discomfort isn't a bug to optimize away. It's the price of memory that lasts.

Retrieval Practice: The One Idea That Matters Most

If you take one thing from the book, take this: trying to remember something strengthens your memory of it more than re-exposure ever will. Psychologists call it retrieval practice, or the testing effect, and it's the most replicated finding in the science of learning.

The landmark study is Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 work in Psychological Science. Students read a passage, then either reread it or took a recall test. On a final test a week later, the group that had practiced retrieving the material massively outperformed the group that had simply reread it, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Feeling and result pointed in opposite directions, which is the theme of the entire book.

The mechanism is intuitive once you see it. Every time you successfully haul an idea out of memory, you reinforce the path back to it, the way a trail gets clearer the more often you walk it. Rereading doesn't make you walk the trail. It shows you a photo of the trail and lets you believe you could find it again.

What this means for a reader is concrete. After you finish an article, a chapter, or a YouTube explainer, close it and try to say what it argued, out loud or on paper, before you look back. That ninety seconds of struggle is worth more than a third read. Our deep dive on active recall covers the technique in detail, and the protégé effect shows why explaining it to someone else (or pretending to) is retrieval on hard mode.

Space It Out, Mix It Up

Two more findings turn retrieval from a one-off trick into a system.

The first is spacing. Reviewing material at intervals beats reviewing it all at once, even when the total study time is identical. Cramming gets you through Friday's quiz and is mostly gone by Monday. The same hour, split across four days, leaves far more behind. The reason is that a little forgetting between sessions is good for you. When recall has gotten slightly harder, the act of retrieving reloads the memory more strongly, which is the same desirable difficulty at work. This is the science under spaced repetition for readers, and you don't need software to start; you need a calendar and a willingness to revisit.

The second is interleaving. Instead of drilling one topic to exhaustion before moving to the next (blocked practice), mix related topics in a single session. A classic demonstration: math students who interleaved different problem types outperformed those who practiced one type at a time, again despite feeling less competent during practice. Interleaving forces your brain to do the harder, more realistic work of figuring out which approach a problem needs, not just how to run an approach you've already been handed.

For reading, interleaving looks like reading across sources on a theme rather than finishing one author before touching another. That's also the core move in syntopical reading, where you put several books in conversation on one question. You retain more, and you understand the topic instead of memorizing one person's take on it.

Elaboration and Generation: Make the Idea Yours

Retrieval gets the idea out. Elaboration and generation make sure there's a rich idea worth retrieving in the first place.

Elaboration means explaining new material in your own words and connecting it to things you already know. The more hooks you attach an idea to, the more ways you have to find it later. When you read about desirable difficulties and think "oh, that's why interval running improved my times more than steady jogging," you've just made the concept far stickier than any highlight could. You gave it a neighbor in your own life.

Generation means trying to produce an answer before you're shown one. Guess the conclusion of an argument before the author states it. Predict how a study turned out before you read the results. Even a wrong guess primes you to absorb the right answer more deeply, because you've created a slot for it. The book is emphatic that struggling productively, then getting feedback, beats being handed the answer cleanly.

Both of these are writing tasks more than reading tasks, which is why the highest-leverage habit in this whole article is to write a two-or-three-sentence note from memory after you read. Not a copied quote. A reconstruction: what was the point, why does it matter, what does it connect to. This is the same generation-beats-storage principle behind how to remember what you read, and it's the move the Feynman technique systematizes by forcing you to explain an idea simply enough for a beginner.

Calibration: Beating the Illusion of Knowing

The book keeps returning to one enemy: confident wrongness. We are bad judges of our own knowledge, and the methods that feel best are the ones most likely to fool us. Calibration is the practice of using honest, external feedback to find out what you actually know versus what you only recognize.

The fix is built into everything above. A recall test doesn't just strengthen memory; it tells you the truth. When you try to explain a chapter from memory and grind to a halt halfway through, that halt is data. It's the gap between feeling and fact made visible, and now you know exactly what to reread, which is the one moment rereading earns its place.

This is why "I read it and it made sense" is such a dangerous report to give yourself. Making sense in the moment is fluency. The only proof of learning is that you can reproduce or use the idea later, ideally when you've half-forgotten it. Build your habit so that proof shows up regularly, and you stop grading yourself on vibes. You can even outsource the quizzing: ask Glasp's AI chat to question you on the highlights you saved from a piece, then answer from memory before you peek. The friction is the feature.

A 7-Day System for Applying Make It Stick to Anything You Read

Here's the whole book compressed into a loop you can run on a single article or a whole book. It uses a highlighter on purpose, with eyes open about what marking does and doesn't do.

Day 0, read and select. Read the piece once, properly. Highlight only the two or three passages that genuinely change your understanding, using Glasp's web highlighter on the web, or Kindle highlights for books. Keep it sparse. A page glowing yellow is a page where you've made no decisions. The highlight is your selection, not your learning.

Day 0, retrieve immediately. Close the tab. Write three sentences from memory: the main argument, why it matters, and one thing it connects to in your own experience. That single step folds in retrieval, elaboration, and generation at once. It takes two minutes and does more than three rereads.

Day 2, first spaced recall. Without reopening the source, try to recall the core idea again. Stuck? Now reopen, and only reread the part you couldn't reconstruct. That's calibration plus targeted repair.

Day 6, interleave. Pull up your recall notes alongside two or three other things you've read on the same theme and write one paragraph connecting them. This is interleaving and elaboration together, and it's where isolated facts turn into understanding.

Ongoing, let it resurface. Schedule your best highlights to come back at widening intervals, the spacing effect on autopilot. A weekly review of recent highlights, or spaced repetition on the keepers, keeps the trail walked. If you prefer cards, you can turn highlights into flashcards, but the deck is optional. The loop is not.

Notice what's missing: rereading as a primary strategy, and highlighting as a finish line. Everything here is some flavor of effortful retrieval, spaced out, in your own words. That's the book, operationalized.

So Where Does Highlighting Actually Fit?

Time to resolve the tension we opened with, because the honest answer is more interesting than "the book is wrong."

Make It Stick attacks highlighting as a substitute for learning, the habit of marking a page and feeling done. On that, the authors are correct, and the data backs them. Passive highlighting is a low-utility technique because marking is not retrieving.

But a highlight has a second life the studies rarely measure. It is, first, an act of selection. Deciding this sentence and not that one is a small judgment about what matters, and judgment is engagement. It's also a durable, searchable artifact that feeds the retrieval steps that actually do the work. The problem the research found was never the yellow bar. It was the empty space after it, where a recall attempt should have been and wasn't.

So the resolution is simple. Highlight less, and never stop there. Treat each highlight as the opening move of the loop above, not the closing one. Used that way, your highlights become the raw material for retrieval, spacing, and elaboration: a personal corpus of the ideas you've judged worth keeping, ready to be quizzed, connected, and resurfaced. That is highlighting in full agreement with Make It Stick, which is a sentence the book's authors might enjoy.

One more honest note. No single method is magic, the authors are clear that learning styles are a myth, and reading their actual examples (a pilot recovering from engine failure, a med student's rounds) will teach you more than any summary. Consider this your push to go read it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main idea of Make It Stick?

That durable learning comes from effortful retrieval, not from re-exposure. Methods that feel easy and fluent, like rereading and highlighting, tend to produce an illusion of knowing, while methods that feel harder, like testing yourself, spacing practice over time, and interleaving topics, build memory that lasts. The authors group the useful hard methods under Robert Bjork's term "desirable difficulties."

Does Make It Stick really say highlighting is bad?

It says highlighting and rereading are low-utility as study strategies on their own, because marking text is not the same as retrieving it from memory. That's an accurate read of the research. It doesn't mean don't highlight; it means don't let highlighting be the whole process. Use a highlight to select what matters, then do something retrieval-based with it: recall it from memory, explain it, quiz yourself, revisit it on a spaced schedule.

What's the difference between retrieval practice and rereading?

Rereading puts information back in front of your eyes; retrieval practice makes you pull it out of your own head. Rereading builds familiarity with the text and feels confident. Retrieval builds a stronger memory path and often feels harder. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study, students who practiced retrieval remembered far more a week later than students who reread, despite the rereaders feeling more prepared.

How do I apply Make It Stick without making flashcards?

Run the loop on what you already read. Highlight sparingly, then immediately write a few sentences from memory about what you read. Revisit the idea a couple of days later without looking, reread only what you couldn't recall, and connect it to other things you've read within the week. Let your highlights resurface over time. Flashcards are one good tool for retrieval and spacing, but the principles work on any reading habit.

Is spaced repetition the same thing as Make It Stick?

Spaced repetition is one technique the book endorses, not the whole book. Make It Stick covers a family of principles: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, elaboration, generation, and calibration. Spaced repetition happens to combine retrieval and spacing in a structured way, which is why it's so effective, but elaboration and interleaving matter just as much for understanding rather than rote recall.

Conclusion

Make It Stick is a hard book to argue with because most of it is just well-replicated research told well. Its central, slightly inconvenient message is that the comfortable study habits, rereading and passive highlighting, are the ones least likely to work, and the uncomfortable ones, testing yourself, spacing it out, mixing it up, explaining it in your own words, are where memory is actually built.

For anyone who learns from reading, the practical takeaway isn't to throw away the highlighter. It's to demote the highlight from a finish line to a starting line. Mark what matters, then make yourself recall it, space the recall out, connect it to what you already know, and check your confidence against what you can actually reproduce. Do that, and the fluency trap loses its grip.

Pick one article or chapter today. Read it, highlight two passages with Glasp, close it, and write three sentences from memory. Come back in two days and try to say what it argued before you look. That small, slightly effortful loop is the entire science of successful learning, running in your own hands. And when you're ready for the source, read the book. It's worth the desirable difficulty.