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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really interested to see some research into integrating spaced repetition into our actual education system. Almost everything I see about it is adults learning, I wonder how much we could speed up primary school education considering so much of the "base" stuff needed to advance is rote memorization anyway

seems like countries should be investing money in this, potentially trillions in unlocked economic potential by improving and speeding up education. I think I read something like 20-30% of medical school students use SRS, yet only a fraction of the general population uses it. Insane to me that we have a tool like this and almost nothing is being done to improve adoption.

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>see some research...spaced repetition into our actual education system.< I have followed the research in this area closely for several years. Most of the (excellent) foundational research was done by university psychology professors who used college students as subjects; it's much harder for them to use primary school students, hence far less research with young learners. Implementing these techniques in elementary schools is more challenging then many would guess. Two good books: "Make it Stick" Brown, Roediger, McDaniel; "Powerful Teaching" Agarwal & Bain. PM me if you'd like more info. The second book describes research with middle school students. Pooja Agarwal also hosts the informative site www.retrievalpractice.org which informs K-12 teachers and has lots of free downloads. I am involved in a startup that is beginning (pilot teachers in September) to implement spaced repetition for elementary school math.

I'm interested in this, but you don't have any contact info in your profile. HN itself doesn't have a messaging feature, so you have to leave an email address or something there. If you'd rather just message me my address is in my profile.

No research here, but I use the great Fresh Cards app (by allenu here on HN) with my daughter's homeschooling, and it works great. We've used it for phonics and all sorts of basic math facts, and I use it for scheduling spelling word review as well. We're about to start teaching science and I anticipate using it a lot there as well.

Hundreds of millions of the world's kids were remote learning for up to a year and a half. If there was any opportunity to develop real tools to help with remote learning, it was then, but we ended up with nothing, and remote learning still sucks.

If anybody is going to integrate memory techniques into a curriculum, it'll probably be some Silicon Valley charter.

Given that so much of modern education happens in large-group settings, it seems hard to apply SRS principles to it. A group of students will be a lot farther from 100% recall of all items than any individual student might be, and the items that require review will correspondingly differ.

Spaced repetition could replace time currently wasted on homework. As a kid I would have much preferred to sit in front of Anki instead of being laden with hours of homework, and it probably would have done me more good over the long term.

Unfortunately it couldn’t, at least not 100%. Spaced repetition works only if you have already learned the material.

Do you have a link to that research that claimed 20-30% of medical school students use SRS?

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