Spaced repetition for study and learning
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#2Spaced repetition is not new, nor fancy, and has direct biological evidence. It works. That said having a good tool and motivation are required. I can recommend ankiweb.net / anki desktop for the first, but can't help with the second. The motivation to follow through on doing cards is what I have trouble with.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#3Does anyone know of any command line spaced repetition tools? if not could be a fun side project.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#4I have been experimenting with spaced repetition algorithms for around two years now, and I've found that for me, an a simple exponent with base of 2.71828 (e) to be optimal for learning short question/answer pairs.
This means, every time I successfully recall the answer to a question, I increase the interval of when I will be challenged with it again by about 2.71828 times since I had seen it previously.
This is with a recall failure rate of about 5%, which I'm trying to maintain. (If it's nearing 0, then you're probably wasting time being challenged too frequently.)
This is on a data set used daily for 30 minutes, reviewing about 50 older questions and encountering around 3 new ones per day.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#5Comprehensive, as usual. An obligatory nitpick:
> At least with physical fitness there isn’t a precisely dismaying number indicating how far behind you are!
Many sports are precisely measurable and in such sports, the measurements determine who has won, to various resolutions. Shortest running time over a given distance, heaviest weight snatched, furthest distance jumped and so on.
Athletes in such sports can very accurately track their performance over time. As of yesterday I demonstrated that I can clean & jerk 25kg less than my lifetime record, for example.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#6at kenHub[1], we built an online trainer for anatomy. It uses a game-like sequence of exercises designed to teach and test you at the same time about anatomy structures and their terminology. We've implemented a very basic spaced-repetition algorithm, but there's always more to improve.
One interesting thing we've found early on, was that when we encouraged people to actually "take a break", not to repeat too much, but instead let your brain process and come back to it later, people didn't like it. They wanted the ability to keep training and training. This resonates well with what the article describe about students' cramming tendency. So some time you have to manipulate even a solid algorithm, to fit with reality.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#7Spaced repetition is not new, nor fancy, and has direct biological evidence. It works. That said having a good tool and motivation are required. I can recommend ankiweb.net / anki desktop for the first, but can't help with the second. The motivation to follow through on doing cards is what I have trouble with.
Beeminder could help with the motivation:
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#8Spaced repetition is not new, nor fancy, and has direct biological evidence. It works. That said having a good tool and motivation are required. I can recommend ankiweb.net / anki desktop for the first, but can't help with the second. The motivation to follow through on doing cards is what I have trouble with.
I managed to hacked myself to build a habit of 30 minutes a day of spaced repetition, building off my momentum to consistently do khanacademy an hour a day(A project which I finished a while ago) in conjunction with my time tracking tool. The key seems to be a bunch of small repeatable goal that allow for small wins. It works for me, though I don't know if it will work for anyone else. Plus, it's only anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.
(I wish there is a accessible book that rigorously about which habit building strategies work according to scientific research)
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#9I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember.
Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful. For these subjects the number of raw facts required is usually smaller, and the thought processes, concepts and problem solving ability are much more important.
However, spaced repetition could be beneficial to these more creative and analytical subjects if it was applied more dynamically. In this case the units to learn could be the rules, laws, concepts which can manifest themselves in different ways within different problems, instead of being static flashcards. Does anyone know of software which works in this way?
My interest in this stems from http://readlang.com, a site I'm working on at the moment for learning foreign languages. I use SRS to keep track of words, but in future it could be nice to think about applying SRS to grammatical concepts too.
Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning
#10I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember. Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytic…
Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful. For these subjects the number of raw facts required is usually smaller, and the thought processes, concepts and problem solving ability are much more important.
My programming flash card usually consists of evaluating pieces of code like:
Question -->
Evaluate the following:
puts "Hello world"
Answer --> Hello world
I cannot memorize the solution as if I memorize the answer to multiplication problems, which is just straight rote memorization. I memorize the process for code evaluation instead. In any case, I do not think anki and similar spaced repetition flash card software are in any way a replacement for actually just writing code and solving lot of different problems. They are always complementary to learning the materials in other ways.