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Effective Spaced Repetition

borretti.me

91–100 of 268 posts

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#91
>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses. >I don’t have much advice in this area, except that if you have persistent problems with conscientiousness, untreated ADHD etc. you should address that first.

This keeps happening to me, and I have somewhat treated (but severe) ADHD.

Does anyone have recommendations to make this easier? Either Anki settings, or using another app.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#92
Used SRS via Mnemosyne (and later Repetitions.app) heavily in studying for all of my US medical board exams. The effort to payoff ratio seemed very satisfactory.

For pre-clinical rotations, a few nerdy peers and I collaborated on a shared deck of a couple thousand slides -- many of them pathology images -- synced via Dropbox.

For the Step exams, I mostly used practice test questions. Any question I missed prompted me to read up on the topic to determine what piece of knowledge would have helped me come to the right answer, and then figure out how to make a decent card for that principle. Every morning I would start by reviewing all my SRS cards, then do a few hours of practice tests. It was really nice being able to be able to take a core component m of my study material on the road by just bringing my phone! A few of the practice question apps had protections in place to prevent copying text (copy and paste saved a fair bit of time, even if there was also a lot of rewriting) -- but figuring out workarounds like running in a VM or screenshotting from the iOS app was never too hard, and I would just queue up the screenshots to batch process toward the end of the day.

I used a similar technique to pass the tech, general, and extra exams for amateur radio with near perfect scores (the verbatim questions and answers are freely available -- I did try to learn the concepts behind most questions, though a few were admittedly memorization without understanding). Unfortunately my small town is too rural to have a local club, and I have too many hobbies to shell out $1k for a HF rig, so I have yet to make a single QSO. I'll eventually find time to put together the QRP CW kit I got for my birthday :)

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#93
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience using spaced repetition for math: math has both semantic and procedural knowledge. The procedural knowledge comes from doing problems and rewriting proofs. But the semantic knowledge is also important, and you can acquire and retain this through spaced repetition. I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think…

"refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process." Can GPT/chatGPT help here ? If yes, how ?

I use it and it's quite effective. I just paste text I want to summarise and just ask (GPT-4) to "Create Anki cards for these paragraphs. Keep the answers brief". It does quite a good job in distilling the knowledge.

And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good guide.

http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making your own cards is a very important step

No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (…

>Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks.

Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical school ones.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#96

Having tried spaced repetition methods for studying for swe interviews, I can concur that it is the most effective way for me learn. It does require an intense amount of discipline though, so wonder how well it will work for me in execution for hobby learning.

What kind of cards did you make for interview prep? Reviewing algorithms?

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#97
post #77

A question to the experienced Anki users: The recommendation is to learn before you memorize. Many times I hack the infos (from an article) right into Anki. Now if it‘d want to review the infos in the Anki app, that totally destroys my stats. What are some of you doing? Extract the info into some other tool, review the infos there and then quiz yourself in Aki?

Why would you care about your stats? Do you have the stuff memorized? Nothing else matters.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#98
post #91

>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses. >I don’t have much advice in this area, except that if you have pe…

You could maybe use an alarm/reminder.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#99
post #91

>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses. >I don’t have much advice in this area, except that if you have pe…

Assuming you use a computer daily, it should be easy to script Anki to open itself at startup at some point during the day, letting you effortlessly have a habit of sitting down and doing 5 minutes of review before your other tasks.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making your own cards is a very important step

No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (…

Med school is a bit of an outlier, because they have high quality shared decks. Most subjects have very low quality shared decks.

I don’t think any other subject at all has a shared deck that’s of similar quality to what AnKing provides for the medical community. Geography/maps have some good shared decks as well.

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