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Interesting thing: it's hard to take a step into Personal Knowledge Management / note-taking / learning systems, and not discover the unreasonable effectiveness

Interesting thing: it's hard to take a step into Personal Knowledge Management / note-taking / learning systems, and not discover the unreasonable effectiveness of Spaced Repetition Systems. However, these ideas were not even hinted at while I was at school, time and space particularly dedicated to learning, and supposedly, learning how to learn.

kiba 5y ago
Education was divorced from laboratory psychology, thus no cross fertilization.
throwoutway 5y ago
I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? In spelling bees they’d tell us to keep practicing the words we got wrong though we should have kept practicing the ones we got right a little longer too
- mrob 5y ago
  I only knew of flash cards as a tool for cramming before exams.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Flashcards are used in spaced repetition systems (typically), but the difference is the "algorithm". There is a deliberate delay between reviews in spaced repetition that you may or may not stumble upon accidentally with flashcards. At a rough approximation, you want to double (more or less) the time between reviewing cards if you know them before seeing them again. Most people studying flashcards won't do that on accident, at best they'll move the easy cards to another pile and review them at some point in the future, but it may be either too soon or too late. In the too soon case, it's probably fine. Not ideal, but fine. They'll have more "this is still easy" cards than if they waited a bit longer. In the too late case, though, they'll have forgotten more material and have to restart cards more often. In a semester long course the too soon case is preferable (more studying than necessary to commit things to memory, but more things in memory), the too late case will mean more cramming at the end.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  > I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? No, they're completely orthogonal IMO. SRS is a scheduler; when do you see a piece of information, based on how well you remembered it the last time you saw it. The card is just the info itself. Going through a set of flashcards every day is not SRS; it completely misses the first S. Many SRS' USE flashcards, but the important bit is the scheduling.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Well yeah, in themselves cards don’t have the S, but even their most basic basic usage of separating wrongly answered ones from the rest and repeating those again adds it back to a degree. There are also versions where you put successfully repeated cards into the next category, repeating them 2/4/8… days until it “matures”.
- kd5bjo 5y ago
  > I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? The key part of spaced repetition is the exponential backoff for correctly-remembered items: An extended time between reviews appears to strengthen your memory much more than a short time, and an exponential schedule will let you add a constant number of items per day without the review load growing uncontrollably. If you want to do this with physical flash cards, you can use something like a Leitner box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

kiba 5y ago

Education was divorced from laboratory psychology, thus no cross fertilization.

throwoutway 5y ago

I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? In spelling bees they’d tell us to keep practicing the words we got wrong though we should have kept practicing the ones we got right a little longer too

mrob 5y ago
I only knew of flash cards as a tool for cramming before exams.
Jtsummers 5y ago
Flashcards are used in spaced repetition systems (typically), but the difference is the "algorithm". There is a deliberate delay between reviews in spaced repetition that you may or may not stumble upon accidentally with flashcards. At a rough approximation, you want to double (more or less) the time between reviewing cards if you know them before seeing them again. Most people studying flashcards won't do that on accident, at best they'll move the easy cards to another pile and review them at some point in the future, but it may be either too soon or too late. In the too soon case, it's probably fine. Not ideal, but fine. They'll have more "this is still easy" cards than if they waited a bit longer. In the too late case, though, they'll have forgotten more material and have to restart cards more often. In a semester long course the too soon case is preferable (more studying than necessary to commit things to memory, but more things in memory), the too late case will mean more cramming at the end.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
> I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? No, they're completely orthogonal IMO. SRS is a scheduler; when do you see a piece of information, based on how well you remembered it the last time you saw it. The card is just the info itself. Going through a set of flashcards every day is not SRS; it completely misses the first S. Many SRS' USE flashcards, but the important bit is the scheduling.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Well yeah, in themselves cards don’t have the S, but even their most basic basic usage of separating wrongly answered ones from the rest and repeating those again adds it back to a degree. There are also versions where you put successfully repeated cards into the next category, repeating them 2/4/8… days until it “matures”.
kd5bjo 5y ago
> I didn’t hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn’t flash cards essentially the same thing? The key part of spaced repetition is the exponential backoff for correctly-remembered items: An extended time between reviews appears to strengthen your memory much more than a short time, and an exponential schedule will let you add a constant number of items per day without the review load growing uncontrollably. If you want to do this with physical flash cards, you can use something like a Leitner box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system