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Spaced repetition for study and learning

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Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#11

Post by joelhooks »

kiba wrote: post #8
iandanforth wrote: post #2

Spaced 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 t…

The Power of Habit and http://tinyhabits.com/ are both great.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#13

Post by Danieru »

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended.

I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day which at my memorization rate works out to ~60 cards to review a day. Thus 20-30 minutes per day of review. It has become such a part of my day that skipping a day makes the day feel like a massive failure.

Its interesting how 4 cards can translate into 60 even with high memorization rates: for every card you add you'll see it again in 2 days, ~4 days, ~8 days, ~2 weeks, ~1 month, ~2 months, ~4 months, ~8 months, ~1 year... A review session is thus made up of multiple standing waves. The effect is noticeable you'll see a workload increase as the next standing wave of review starts. Right now some reviewed cards are getting scheduled next in ~8 years!

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#15

Post by steveridout »

kiba wrote: post #10
steveridout wrote: post #9

I 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…

The danger is that it's very possible to memorize 100s of answers like this without having any idea of how the code is working.

Imagine if instead of static flashcards there the SRS worked on items like:

- puts

- the '+' operator

- variables

- functions

Then an algorithm would generate problems incorporating those concepts. The exact same problem would never appear twice so you can't learn by rote and it ensures you actually learn the concepts. Your progress on each concept would be tracked by the SRS algorithm to help schedule your learning.

I think this would be a huge improvement on static flashcards.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#16

Post by dxhdr »

Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memorization, 60% of it is gone within the first year of stopping (http://supermemo.com/articles/kowal.htm). The brain does not want to work this way.

I'll propose an alternative to rote memorization for learning: critical thinking.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#17

Post by fsiefken »

narwally wrote: post #3

Does anyone know of any command line spaced repetition tools? if not could be a fun side project.

i am looking for that as well.. if you use emacs there are org-drill.el and flashcard.el:

http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/02/rediscovering-emacs-featur...

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#18

Post by mikevm »

I always like sticking to the very best, so SuperMemo was the choice for me. I remember spending a couple of weeks just reading the whole website (http://www.supermemo.com/) because it contained so much interesting information on learning and memorization. It also took a while to understand how to use the program properly because it probably has one of the worst UIs one can imagine ;-).

Anyways, I ended up dumping SuperMemo because once my item database grew I became too lazy to spend 30 minutes (or more!) each day going through this drill. I might get back to it at some point, though.

Edit: By the way, SuperMemo offers a few more interesting tools.

One is "Incremental Reading", where you can import an article or text file into SM and SM will let you incrementally process it. For example, it might pop up as part of your repetition routine, and you can read a few paragraphs (you read as much as you want), and pick out the important parts of what you've read (parts you want to remember). Once you're done reading, you continue and the whole text will come up again and again, until you finish reading it and then you can dismiss it. The parts you cut out from the text become separate learning items and they too will come up in your daily routines, which let you further work on them until you ultimately reduce them into a Question & Answer form.

Another tool is sleeping monitoring. SM will let you track your sleep data, and it will tell you how your sleep affects your memory performance.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#19

Post by dilap »

dxhdr wrote: post #16

Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memor…

Spaced repetition is just choosing the frequency with which you engage in an activity. Whether that activity is memorizing random-facts w/o context or something more in-depth is up to you.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#20

Post by kanzure »

mikevm wrote: post #18

I always like sticking to the very best, so SuperMemo was the choice for me. I remember spending a couple of weeks just reading the whole website ( http://www.supermemo.com/ ) because it contained so much interesting information on learning and memorization. It also took a while to understand how to use the program properly because it probably has one of the worst UIs one can imagine ;-). Anyways, I ended up dumping…

    > Anyways, I ended up dumping SuperMemo because once my item database
    > grew I became too lazy to spend 30 minutes (or more!) each
    > day going through this drill.
Yeah, same happened to me. But I didn't catch on so soon, and I found myself spending 2 hours/day on it before I started to scratch my head.

When I started, it wasn't obvious, but clearly there is an upper limit on the rate of new entries that the system can support. Plus, you have to factor in time spent doing data entry. I think these factors combine to make for a life-time limit on the number of entries. Suppose you use SuperMemo for 20 years (7300 days) at 2 hours per day (14600 hours) and 100 new entries per day. That's only 1.4 million unique entries.. (this analysis is severely lacking and deserves more thought).

Insert here some humbling story about the benefits of improving meta-aspects of how and what you pick to spend time on. Obviously, inserting everything you ever come across into SuperMemo is a bad idea.

Anyway, then I realized this was all stupid because I remembered everything anyway. So now I'm off SuperMemo. Hooray memory!

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