Coaching practices for Science of Learning

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Science of Learning, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I always reach for the way of studying that feels most comfortable to me, and I’m starting to wonder if "this is how I learn best" is just an excuse to avoid the methods that actually work but feel harder.
• When I try to learn this I’m juggling a dozen separate little facts at once and they keep falling out of my head before I can see how any of them connect
• I learn everything in just one channel
• I’ve watched all the videos and read all the guides and I still can’t actually do the thing

Practices that may help

1. Make It Stick: The Science of Learning
   "Make It Stick", by Peter Brown with psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, distills decades of cognitive science into a few high-leverage practices: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and elaboration. Its central counterintuitive claim — that the most effective learning feels harder and slower than rereading — is backed by strong experimental evidence.
2. Judgments of Learning: Why You Misjudge What You’ve Learned
   Judgments of learning (JOLs) are in-the-moment predictions about how well information will be remembered later. Thomas Nelson’s research showed JOLs are often inaccurate — biased upward by current processing fluency — causing learners to declare items "learned" prematurely and under-study material they will later forget. Delayed JOLs and retrieval-based checks produce more accurate predictions and better study-time allocation.
3. Stop studying "to your style" — study to the content
   Choose your study method based on what the material requires, not what feels comfortable.
   The Learning Styles Myth: What the Research Actually Says
4. Chunk related elements before presenting sequences
   Group tightly related pieces of information into single named units before teaching the steps that connect them.
   Cognitive Load Theory: Learning Within Working Memory Limits
5. Use multiple modalities to encode information, not just one
   Read about it, draw it, say it aloud, and use it in an example — all in one session.
   The Learning Styles Myth: What the Research Actually Says
6. Learn through action, not just observation
   Do the thing — physically enact, build, or rehearse — rather than studying it at one remove.
   Embodied Cognition: How Your Body Shapes Your Thinking
7. The Learning Styles Myth: What the Research Actually Says
   The popular idea that people have fixed learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and learn best when instruction matches their style is not supported by controlled research. Dozens of studies have found no benefit to matching instruction style to supposed learning style. The better question is which study method works best for the specific type of content — and the answer to that question is well studied and quite different from the learning-styles framework.
8. Post-session reflection
   Immediately after a learning session, evaluate what you learned, what strategies worked, and what to do next.
   Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn
9. Cognitive Apprenticeship: Learning by Making Thinking Visible
   Cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown & Newman, 1989) is a teaching model that applies the master-apprentice relationship to cognitive skills by making expert thinking visible. It uses modeling, coaching, and scaffolding to externalize normally invisible reasoning, then fades support as the learner internalizes the skill. It has strong theoretical grounding and is widely used in medical and professional education, though controlled trials against alternatives are limited.
10. Perceptual Learning: Training Your Eye Before Your Mind
    Perceptual learning is the improvement of discrimination and recognition through practice — training the perceptual system to detect distinctions that were previously invisible. Philip Kellman’s research shows it can be induced rapidly with well-designed training software and produces durable, transfer-ready expertise that complements conceptual instruction.

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