Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
High
- Distributed practice
- Practice testing
Moderate
- Elaborative interrogation
- Interleaved practice
- Self-explanation
Low
- Highlighting
- Imagery use for text learning
- Rereading
- Summarization
- The keyword mnemonic
// via: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1630938305213628417 ( see tips How AI/ChatGPT can help )
High
- Distributed practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time
- Practice testing: Self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material
Moderate
- Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true
- Interleaved practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session
- Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving
Low
- Highlighting: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
- Imagery use for text learning: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
- Rereading: Restudying text material again after an initial reading
- Summarization: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts
- The keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
Highlighting is an indexing technique, and maybe a marginal improvement to reading. It's a piece of a solution.
That was really common when I was in school and is fairly low effort.
Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?
If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).
- A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away.
- A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them.
- A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence.
Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive.
I, personally, just am reading a novel series Japanese, 8 books in. While reading, I have highlighted all the words/parts I didn't know in order to export them and make flashcards out of them. I haven't still started going through them, but the thought of doing so feels laborious, so procrastinating is bound to happen.
Has worked well for me.
I don’t see making flash cards in the list. Do you consider it summarization?
The article is incredibly nuanced, and answers many more questions than only "is this method any good?"
I'd also say it's not correct to place rereading at low effectiveness. The result on the article is more complicated than that.
Also, the article is mostly about memorization learning, and entirely about things with correct/incorrect answers. How well this generalizes for learning the things you need outside of schools isn't there at all.
From what I understand as well, self-explanation can be higher depending on how elaborate the encoding is.
edit: just noticed that the date was 2013 and not 2023 so 10 years is correct. I read this same article long ago.
> a multiple-choice practice test increased intrusions of false alternatives on a final cued-recall test when no feedback was provided, whereas no such increase was observed when feedback was given
Sounds like practice tests are most useful when they are graded and the student gets that feedback. I suppose that makes sense. Flash cards and practice problems also fall under practice testing and it sounds like they were less effective.
So you can get very good at memorizing occassionally incorrect information? If I'm going to put in the effort to drill information into my brain with spaced-repetition, I have a high bar for the accuracy of that information.
I hand write all my cards, and think it's commonly accepted that the manual process of producing the cards is an important first step in the memorization process.
I wouldn't trust it to generate cards from scratch.
A lot of the time I end up never reading them, or reading them once because I already indirectly studied everything in the process of making them in the first place.
You just have to memorize the damn thing. There are no shortcuts.
You can also identify patterns within domains, which is a pretty common way to begin tackling problems or questions that you don’t really know but can start making an educated guess about.
The useless way is: let me memorize all of the dates of the US Presidents. If the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you remember it's 1869.
The useful way is, let me learn about each Presidential administration and what baggage it inherited from the previous administration and passed onto the next one. Then, if the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you think, well Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, Johnson served out his term but definitely didn't get another, so Grant would have started in 1869.
I'm imagining these as group activities, not something one would do alone.
I also freely admit my naivety regarding these subjects.
Finally, I don't think these or similar approaches are "short cuts". Quite the opposite.
I dual majored in history in college in the 90s. The best professors made you write a paper every class that would fit on the front of a college ruled looseleaf paper that would be more comfortable to write on 3-4 pages.
The process of writing and editing taught you to think. Journalism writing before the shit-fest of online news was similar. 6 editors would wield the sword over whatever you wrote.
I feel like I must be attacking a straw man here, as you’re not the only individual I’ve met who found spaced repetition revelatory, but I’m still not sure what I’m missing.
There is often a misconception that subjects like physics are solely about understanding and reasoning, but at the school level, it is necessary to have a solid grasp of the laws and formulas. Without this foundation, it is like attempting to write a program in a programming language without knowing the syntax. You have to stop and look up the syntax for each line of code, slowing down the entire process. Some things simply need to be memorized to achieve a certain level of proficiency.
This is pretty much the opposite of my experience. I have learned many programming languages and never found it useful to memorize any syntax. I read the book/docs/tutorial once, and then reference it (or code I previously wrote) just-in-time whenever I need a reminder, and find that whatever I use repeatedly is quickly committed to memory. I don't see how memorization could make this faster.
The more cards I created/added made it worse.
I would recommend not giving up but instead altering your approach. I tried spaced repetition multiple times in grad school and completely failed at it. I then tried again over 10 years later (and much older!) and it was really like attaining a super power. The success is even more remarkable because compared to my university days, I am much less actively using the material in the cards.
In my case, the difference between the two attempts was sticking to the daily schedule[1] and getting better at creating relevant cards.
And keep in mind: SR aids in recall, not in understanding. There have been times where I look at the cards on a certain topic and do very poorly (consistently). I then realize it's partly because some key understanding has been lost. I then need to do a proper study session (get the book out, read for understanding, perhaps do some problems). After that study session, I get good on the cards and stay good for a long time. In the last 4 years, I've needed to do this perhaps twice.
[1] Yes, I do stop from time to time, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.
I certainly wanted it to work, when I first learned about it I thought it was the answer. But I seemed to get worse and more stressed out because I wasn't learning anything.
I'm not too fussed about it not working for me. I don't think there is a one size style of learning.
Not sure if I'm just an outlier, but I think you're right that many learning heuristics aren't one-size-fits-all. Hope you can find something that's effective (and enjoyable) for you. :)
Once I realized that understand is different from recall, it made a world of difference.
When people complain about the difficulty of their college math courses or the math problems they solve at work, I can assure that it's not because they had a hard time remembering the answer to a multiplication. In a lot of cases, the equations they are trying to solve don't even have numbers in them. And when there are numbers, you won't be able to calculate them mentally because they won't simplify like they do in a no-calculator math exam.
You might not have realized, but a lot of the work when designing a no-calculator exam is to make sure people can compute the numbers mentally. When you step out in the real world, 32x9 becomes into 32.091x9.1^1.1. It turns ugly real fast when you have to deal with real numbers instead of a carefully crafted exam question.
When I can edit code via vim keybindings quickly, I can move things, sketch ideas, swap entire blocks, and so on, easily. That lets me check and look at things, and allow my whole brain to be spent on higher level things like looking at the control flow, applying aesthetic considerations to simplify, or whatever.
I failed Calc 3 as a college freshman because I had taken high school calc as a junior, leaving a full year between. I understood the ideas of calc 3, but couldn't remember the basic stuff like integrating tan() or whatever. (and I also didn't have any study discipline at the time to actually solve for my situation). So I couldn't answer the questions on a test even though I knew the steps I would need to take past a roadblock. Solvable with study, which would have been effective in the form of spaced repetition flash cards.
In a sense, the nature of a specialized career forces you to engage in spaced repetition of the things you need to know, and allows you to safely ignore the stuff you never need to touch again. If we encouraged spaced repetition on each and everything, I would be wasting a ton of time on subjects that ultimately aren't relevant, at the expense of free time and maximizing time spent on the relevant bits.
> As you specialize, you frequently have major classes where its "first week or two we dig into what you already should know, then we really dive into the deeper stuff."
Yes, they do this. But I've often seen (especially at the undergrad level) instructors avoiding topics or challenging problems because it required material beyond just the basic math/calculus (e.g. some trig identities, differential equations, etc). So in practice, this is not happening.
> Or you take up a job, and maybe you have to refer to that one topic from class years ago twice a year, that's spaced repetition.
It's even worse at work, where you don't have a teacher to enforce things. Suggestions get shot down all the time because coworkers have forgotten some (even trivial) things they learned at university, and they do not want to review it. I've seen this happens where they avoid basic Calc I stuff, where they avoid stuff in data structures (e.g. union find). They'll implement a poor solution, and convince management it can't be done better. Or that it can but it's a long term risk because if that one person who knows "union find" leaves, we won't be able to hire someone to maintain it, etc.
> If we encouraged spaced repetition on each and everything, I would be wasting a ton of time on subjects that ultimately aren't relevant, at the expense of free time and maximizing time spent on the relevant bits.
Michael Nielsen did an analysis of this after using Anki for a bunch of years: The average amount of time spent on a card over one's lifetime is about 10 minutes. And so he used that as a metric when encountering any new piece of information: "If I don't learn it, do I think I will spend more than 10 minutes looking it up in the future?" If yes, he'll make a flashcard for it. If not, he won't.
But yes, I definitely have disabled cards on topics that I don't think I'll want to touch again in the future.
if anything, it's higher level education (4, 5, and 600 level college courses) where i saw a lack of spaced repetition, or any sort of learning beyond the professor presenting the material. I guess it's expected that at that point you have your learning technique figured out.
In post-secondary education, the amount of material, typically due to the speed or density of delivery, may reveal that your learning technique isn't working. For example you may spend too much time on one topic rather than on a topic more heavily weighted in an exam.
Haphazard spaced repetition.
Just because spaced repetition isn't good for everything doesn't mean it shouldn't be used for what it is good at. It's good for remembering the specifics of things that you have already learned and understood.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Outsmart-Your-Brain/D...
His book "Why Students Don't Like School" is one of the best books on cognition I've ever read if you can transfer its knowledge from the pedagogical form in which it's presented.
Wow, really activates my almonds. That massive complex academic performance for a conclusion you could have received if you just asked your grandmother.
To me, this is a branch of scientism.
Music education is full of standard exercises like this that build skills and fluency in them until students can combine them in ways that seem magical to outsiders.
- Grandma
"Improving Student's Learning with Learning Techniques That Improve Learning by virtue of being Effective".
It needs to be clear that not all techniques are the same. Only some are effective. Moreover, it's not clear that what it means for a learning technique to be effective is that it improves learning. And so—aha!—that is why the study is only about the effective ones.
All it did was stress me out because I wasn't recalling anything and all my cards were repeated basically all the time.
Is there a guide you can recommend that shows me how to use it properly?
But it honestly depends on the purpose, and the person. There are tunables about how often you see cards in the learning phase, how many new cards are released daily, and how impactful forgetting is on future reviews. Language learning cards focused on vocabulary, may need a longer "learning" stage than math or science topics. So a lot of this comes down to looking at your recall percent, and tuning / reducing new cards added cards to the review set until you are hitting 80-90 percent recall for a week straight. I don't even recall the defaults but especially if you are downloading other people's decks its easy to drown in new cards.
My other suggestion is to use Cloze deletion cards where feasible. It's much easier to learn the US Bill of rights as a set of clauses than trying to recall the seventh amendment on demand in its entirety, and Cloze makes it simple to produce these.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
Problem solving is great practice for learning, and covers the 3rd and 4th domain levels (application and analysis, respectively). However, what Bloom believed is that learning is hierarchal, and to apply and analyze you must complete the first two domain levels (memorization and understanding).
Anki in the terms of math and physics is great for that (and I will also rarely create a flashcard out of a exercise, but that is mostly because I think something similar will be tested on later).