Mark A. McDaniel

Mark A. McDaniel is a cognitive psychologist and professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. There he helped lead a research center devoted to applying the science of cognition to learning and education. His career has centered on a practical question: how memory works when people actually need it, at a desk, in an exam hall or in the middle of a busy day.

Much of his early reputation came from research on prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to carry out an intention in the future, such as taking a medication or passing on a message. Working closely with Gilles O. Einstein, he helped turn this everyday kind of remembering into a recognized field of study. He looked at how cues in the environment trigger intentions and how this capacity changes as people age.

Alongside that work, McDaniel and his Washington University colleague Henry L. Roediger III brought research on learning out of the laboratory and into schools. They ran studies in real middle-school classrooms that tested whether low-stakes quizzing and other retrieval-based methods improved what students retained over time. That line of research fed directly into Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014), which he co-wrote with Roediger and the writer Peter C. Brown. The book presented findings on retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving and the illusions of fluency to a general audience of students, teachers, coaches and professionals.