Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide

Written by Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki, designed and illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli. Published by Routledge in 2018.

Weinstein and Sumeracki founded The Learning Scientists, the non-profit project that translates cognitive psychology into something teachers and students can actually use. This book is that work in print.

The argument

The book does not try to convince you of a new idea. It does something more modest: it gathers what has been demonstrated into one place and presents it so you can use it.

The spine is six strategies with the strongest evidence behind them:

Spaced practice — spread learning across time. Retrieval practice — pull from memory instead of rereading. Interleaving — mix problem types. Elaboration — ask why and how, connecting new knowledge to what you already hold. Concrete examples — anchor abstractions in real cases. Dual coding — combine words with visuals.

The distinctive part: the book applies its own principles to itself. Caviglioli's illustrations are not decoration — they are working demonstrations of dual coding and of managing cognitive load.

What is actually in it

The book runs in four parts.

Part one covers evidence-based education — how learning research gets made, and why it so often fails to reach a classroom.

Part two explains basic cognitive processes: attention, memory, forgetting. This is the foundation, and it explains why the six strategies work rather than merely listing them.

Part three walks through each strategy in turn, with worked applications.

Part four gives separate practical tips for students, for teachers and for parents — three groups who need to do different things with the same set of principles.

The book also spends real space dismantling myths common in education, learning styles and the left-brain/right-brain idea among them.

Why read it

Because it is the best reference on this shelf.

Make It Stick is the book you read straight through and come away persuaded. This is the one you reopen on a Sunday evening while planning a lesson, when you need to recall exactly how interleaving differs from spacing. The structure is clear, the visuals are scannable, and each strategy sits where you can find it.

For a teacher, part four earns the price on its own: it does not stop at principles, it says what to change in the lesson plan.

Where it is thin

Plainly: this is a synthesis, not an argument. If you have read Make It Stick, much here will feel familiar — the two overlap substantially. Reading them back to back wastes your time. Pick one to start with and leave the other for later.

Of the six strategies, the evidence is not equally strong for all six. Retrieval and spacing are the most solid. Dual coding is the weakest — combining words and visuals sounds sensible and has theoretical grounding, but the experimental support is considerably thinner than for the first two, and the book does not clearly signal those differences in confidence.

Finally, this is a reference book more than a reading experience. Straight through, cover to cover, it feels dry and disjointed. It was built to be consulted, and it should be used that way.

What the six strategies actually look like

The list is easy to remember, but it only becomes useful once you know what each one looks like in practice.

Spacing: thirty minutes a day across four days rather than two hours in one evening. Same total time, very different result.

Retrieval: close the notebook and write down what you can remember, then open it to check. Not rereading the notes.

Interleaving: work through mixed exercises so that each question forces you to identify which type it is — something a block of identical problems never asks of you.

Elaboration: for every new concept, ask why is that so? and what does this resemble that I already know?

Concrete examples: for every abstract definition, invent two examples — and, more usefully, one counter-example.

Dual coding: draw a diagram of something you just read in words. It does not need to be good; the translation between two forms of representation is the part that works.

The free material behind it

Worth knowing before you buy: the authors' Learning Scientists project releases most of the core material free — posters on the six strategies, student handouts, a podcast, blog posts.

The book gives you the theoretical grounding and a tighter organisation. But if what you need is the set of posters for a classroom wall, you do not need to buy anything.

Very few authors say this plainly about their own book, so it is said here instead.

Who should skip it

If you finished Make It Stick within the last few months, leave this one. You will meet the same studies and the same conclusions, and the familiarity will make you skim — and skimming leaves nothing behind.

And if you are a solo learner rather than a teacher, part four — the most valuable part of the book — is aimed mostly at people running a classroom. Outsmart Your Brain serves you better.

If you take one thing

Those six strategies are the complete list of what has been demonstrated. Every other study tip you meet online is either one of these six under a different name, or not yet evidenced.

Knowing where that line falls saves an enormous amount of time.