About this ebook
About the author
Tappan Merianne is an educational researcher, curriculum designer, and the founder of the Independent Study Project, an organization that develops open-access learning resources for self-directed students. She has spent the past two decades studying the cognitive science of memory and retrieval, and distilling those findings into practical study systems used by thousands of learners worldwide.
Tappan began her career as a classroom educator, teaching physics and mathematics at the secondary level. She earned a master's degree in Educational Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her thesis examined the interaction between retrieval difficulty and long-term retention in STEM learners. She has since published articles on evidence-based learning in the Journal of Educational Psychology, The Learning Scientists Blog, and The Chronicle of Higher Education
She has designed study-skill curricula for high schools, universities, and independent learning programs across North America and Europe. Her work focuses on closing the gap between what cognitive science knows about learning and what learners actually practice. She is a frequent speaker at education conferences and has led over a hundred workshops on active recall, spaced repetition, and self-directed study design.
Tappan currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she reads neuroscience papers for fun, maintains a growing collection of study templates, and tests every idea in this book on her own learning projects. When not writing or teaching, she is likely running trails in the Pacific Northwest or working through a statistical modeling course with a stack of index cards beside her laptop.
