About This Book

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn is a book about how education systems are set up to nurture and cull students. It discusses the importance of college degrees, the history of IQ tests, and the importance of spacing, curiosity, and forgetting in learning. It also discusses the theories of Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert, and the debate between inside-out and outside-in learning. It suggests that knowledge should be acquired through discovery and construction, and that metacognitive biases should be taken into account. Finally, it suggests that mastery learning and felt difficulty should be used to help students learn.

Top Highlights

• revisiting a memory while retrieval strength is high.
• by giving retrieval strength time to subside, it gave learners a chance to shore up storage strength; plus, as an additional bonus, there were still all those benefits at the synapse level that neuroscientists had been talking about since the 1970s.
• Spaced learning, alternately referred to as “spaced repetition” and “spaced practice,” is up there with vigorous daily exercise and flossing in the universally-acclaimed-yet-avoided department.
• Once you realize how education systems are set up not just to nurture, but also to cull, you begin to see it everywhere.
• Autor demonstrated in a 2014 paper in Science, pursuing a college degree remains one of the smartest financial decisions you can make, leading to a median lifetime benefit of roughly $500,000.