Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an educational setting. I was teaching linear algebra. What I did was make the homework incremental - 1/3 of homework on today's material, 1/3 on the previous week, and 1/3 anything in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty.

I also started every class with a question/answer period. The rules were simple, the questioning will last at least 10 minutes, and you don't want me to ask the questions. :-) Anything that had come up in the questions that seemed to be a point of confusion was sure to be added to the next homework set.

I won't go into what else I did with that class, but the end result is worth thinking about. First note that I gave a ridiculously hard final. Other grad students who saw it thought that the class would bomb. Secondly they aced the test. What do I mean by aced? Well I had a bonus question which fellow grad students thought nobody would get. 70% of the class got that question, and a good fraction were over 100% on the test. So they must have studied hard, right? Nope. I ran into some students several months later. They told me that they tried to study for the final and stopped after a few minutes because it was useless, they knew everything. And several months later they still knew much of the material cold!

The thing is that none of what I did was very radical. The principles have been known for a century. Psychologists have been trying to get people to listen for that long. I learned about it in the 80s from a university course I watched on TV. (British Columbia had a TV channel devoted to lectures for correspondence courses.)

Yet, despite how dramatic the effects are, nobody listens and nobody takes advantage of it.

This article is written as if SuperMemo were the only software that uses spaced repetition (SRS) algorithms for learning. Actually there are quite a number of other programs out there including some that are free or open source. I've used SuperMemo for years on my Palm and found it very useful for learning French but the software (at least for the Palm) hasn't been updated for many years and doesn't give the user any control whatsoever over how the program is used. For learning Chinese I've moved to a commercial product called Pleco on the Palm which is basically a dictionary but also has elaborate SRS functionality, it's really light years ahead of SuperMemo. Other more generic SRS programs include Anki and Mnemosyne. Unlike SuperMemo, it's easy to migrate your flashcards among these other applications. One other point, SRS is a huge help to learning vocabulary but learning words is only one part of mastering a language.

A lot of fluff here but still interesting stuff.

You beat to it. I've had the site on my favorites list for months, it's got more information than the article, but it wasn't anywhere near convincing enough to get me to actually spend any money. Maybe I'll go through it again and see.

This remind me of a drawing book called "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". It teaches people how to draw realistically using techniques like contour drawing among other stuff.

However, middle school art teachers seem stuck in their little art project. I am not sure about high school, but it doesn't look like they teach the skills.