Make It Stick

Audit any set of study habits, training program, or course design for ineffective learning practices and replace them with evidence-based alternatives. Use this skill when someone wants a study habits audit, suspects they are making learning mistakes, reports that their studying is not working, relies on rereading, highlighting, or cramming, wonders whether their training design actually produces learning, or asks "what am I doing wrong?" Also triggers on: ineffective studying complaints, rereading concerns, learning styles assumptions, cramming before an exam, blocked practice schedules, highlighting as primary review method, "I study for hours but nothing sticks," or any study strategy review. Works for individual learners, teachers, corporate trainers, instructional designers, and coaches. Detects five named anti-patterns — rereading trap, massed practice delusion, illusions of knowing cluster, learning styles myth, errorless learning myth — with mechanism explanations, severity ratings, and direct routing

Diagnose and correct false confidence in learning mastery using cognitive science research. Use when you feel confident about a topic but keep failing tests, want to audit your metacognition for illusions of knowing, are preparing for a high-stakes assessment and need to verify actual mastery, or suspect your study method is producing Dunning-Kruger overconfidence. Also use for: identifying which of 7 specific cognitive distortions — fluency illusion, hindsight bias, Dunning-Kruger overconfidence, curse of knowledge, false consensus, imagination inflation, social memory contamination — is inflating your self-assessment accuracy; distinguishing reliable mastery indicators (delayed recall, novel problem transfer, peer explanation) from unreliable ones (rereading fluency, immediate recall, familiarity warmth); selecting calibration instruments (self-quizzing, cumulative quizzing, peer instruction) matched to the specific distortions detected; designing a dynamic testing cycle (assess → identify gaps → target pra

Design a concrete practice schedule that will actually make learning stick — not just feel productive. Use this skill when the user is preparing for a test, building a new skill, training others, or planning a study program and needs to decide how to structure practice sessions over time. Triggers include: user is relying on marathon study sessions or cramming before a deadline; user practices one topic exhaustively before moving to the next; user feels they know material during practice but forgets it on tests or in real situations; user wants to know how often to review flashcards or revisit past material; user needs to design a training curriculum for a team or class; user is switching between topics during study and wants to know if that is helping or hurting; user is preparing for a performance context (exam, job, sport) and must choose between depth on one skill versus breadth across many. This skill does NOT address memorization technique or recall strategy — use retrieval-practice-study-system for tho

Run a structured reflection or debrief after any learning experience, project, procedure, or performance to turn raw experience into durable skill. Use this skill whenever the user wants to do an after-action review, write a learning journal entry, debrief a session, run a post-mortem, reflect on what went well and what to improve, turn a recent experience into a lesson they will remember, create a reflection document after completing a course chapter or training, or consolidate learning from a recent event — even if they do not use the words "reflection" or "retrieval." Works for students, professionals, coaches, clinicians, writers, teachers, and anyone learning from experience. Do NOT use this skill to build a spaced repetition quiz system (use retrieval-practice-study-system) or to analyze an external document for content (use a different skill).

Classify any learning activity, practice structure, or instructional design element as a desirable difficulty (strengthens encoding) or undesirable difficulty (creates friction without learning benefit). Use this skill when an instructional designer, trainer, teacher, or learner wants to audit a course design, training session, study method, or practice regimen for evidence-based difficulty management — even if they don't use the phrase "desirable difficulty." Applies to onboarding programs, corporate training, academic course design, self-study plans, coaching sessions, and skill development programs. Identifies which of six proven difficulty strategies are present or absent (spacing, interleaving, variation, retrieval, generation, elaboration) and generates specific redesign recommendations. Do NOT use this skill to build a full study schedule (use retrieval-practice-study-system), to assess learner readiness or aptitude, or to evaluate content quality unrelated to difficulty structure.

Design a complete self-quizzing study system for any subject, course, or learning goal. Use this skill whenever the user wants to study more effectively, stop wasting time rereading notes, build a study schedule from learning material, prepare for exams, create flashcard decks with a spacing system, design a practice-quiz regimen, or turn any document into a retrieval-based learning plan — even if they don't mention "retrieval practice" or "spaced repetition." Works for students at any level, professionals upskilling, lifelong learners, and coaches designing training programs. Do NOT use this skill to evaluate whether a textbook or course is good (that is a different task), or to build automated quiz software (that requires a coding skill).

Redesign a corporate training program, employee training curriculum, employee onboarding, or in-service training so that learning actually sticks past the end of the session. Use this skill when a company's training is built on lecture-heavy workshops, single-topic day-long blocks, or passive e-learning modules that employees promptly forget; when an L&D team needs to convert a massed-practice curriculum into an evidence-based architecture; when a trainer or workshop design lead is building a new training program from scratch and wants to apply learning science from the start; when onboarding for a sales, technical, or certification role needs to produce durable competence rather than a test-passing event; when management asks why employees cannot apply training back on the job; when training program design needs to show measurable retention and transfer, not just satisfaction scores. This skill applies the corporate training models from Farmers Insurance (interleaved four-domain curriculum, FORE scaffolding,

Design or redesign any course, class, or training session using evidence-based instructional principles. Use this skill when a teacher, instructor, or instructional designer wants to improve student retention and achievement through classroom design, course design, quiz design, or active learning strategies — even if they don't mention "retrieval practice" or "spaced repetition." Triggers include: instructor wants to reduce failure rates in a gateway course; teacher finds students forget material within days of a lecture; instructor relies on midterm and final exams as the only assessment; teacher wants to move from passive lecturing to active learning without losing content coverage; instructor wants to close the achievement gap between well-prepared and under-prepared students; course designer wants to embed low-stakes quizzing into a curriculum; teacher wants to raise student performance on Bloom's higher-order thinking levels; instructor wants to redesign student engagement without adding complexity. Work

Diagnose fixed vs growth mindset patterns and design a deliberate practice protocol for expertise development. Use when someone wants to develop expertise in a skill domain, is struggling to improve despite repeated practice, attributes their performance plateau to talent limits, praises or criticizes someone for being a "natural," says "I'm just not good at this," avoids challenges to protect their reputation, or asks how to get to 10000 hours effectively. Applies Dweck's 4-quadrant model (fixed/growth mindset × performance/learning goal orientation) to classify the learner's current stance, identifies fixed-mindset signals and attribution patterns, then designs a deliberate practice plan using Ericsson's 5 characteristics. Growth mindset is the prerequisite — without it, deliberate practice collapses into avoidance. Together they form a complete talent vs effort expertise-building pathway. Produces: mindset diagnostic report + deliberate practice plan with feedback loops, mental model targets, and practice