I’ve used flash cards with Anki in the past for memorizing the IPA symbols, Swedish words, and a few other things. It worked pretty well.<p>What I’ve realized recently while learning Rust (no Anki involved) is that, for me at least, new information needs something to “cling on” to. I wonder if this Spacing Effect is another facet of the same idea.<p>My process with Rust was to first read most of The Book [0], and after this I had a decent understanding and I _thought_ I’d be able to write some code. The I tried (and mostly fumbled) writing some code. But it turned out I couldn’t remember much of the syntax, nor the finer details of how the borrowing system worked. Most of the stuff I’d read hadn’t really stuck.<p>After some time coding I went back and reread parts of The Book that I was fuzzy on, and those things came into clearer focus, and I was able to get further with the code.<p>The cycle repeated itself a few times - first with basic syntax, then with how to specify generic types, then with various ways I tangled myself up with the borrow checker, then lifetimes, then how to write iterators. With each stage I needed the sum of my previous experience PLUS another visit to either The Book or Programming Rust or some other explanation. Reading it all up front wasn’t good enough; ingesting the info needed to come at the right time.<p>I’ve seen this a lot also with people learning to code (especially in the web dev world), where they’ll watch a whole course and then lament that they still can’t build anything on their own. I think it’s the same core issue: too much information-up-front with nothing for it to stick to.<p>0: <a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/" rel="nofollow">https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/</a>
Instead of coining a new term, why not call it by the name everyone uses: spaced repetition?<p>One of the best articles I have read on this is by Michael Nielsen: <a href="http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html" rel="nofollow">http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html</a>
These kinds of articles show up here frequently and I'm curious how people apply this to their actual work. Makes a ton of sense for school, but day to day how is this used by tech professionals?
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.<p>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.
If anyone is interested in seeing Spaced Repetition applied in different areas besides language and vocabulary. I have a free website called Piano Gym that lets you do use spaced repetition with Piano and sheet music.<p>It's pretty spiffy, and I can go on at length about it. I have a video explaining it here:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4</a><p>And a long form interview explaining it here:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrDAC6ZYGHk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrDAC6ZYGHk</a><p>I personally use Piano Gym and I've found it to be pretty helpful in getting you to a point of practice and reading sheet music. But there's always more work to do for some of my more ambitious features. However it's a free tool and I have to make my money at my job. So enhancements come out slow.
For those interested, I’ve been working on an app that applies these principles for the past 3 years. [0] It uses markdown for formatting and a local-first architecture that works offline.<p>[0] <a href="https://mochi.cards/" rel="nofollow">https://mochi.cards/</a>
I've been reading a lot around this "spaced repetition" movement over the years and also tried it out sometimes myself. However, I'm still kinda a bit confused about this supposedly big "rote memorization I learnt in school" vs "spaced repetition which is what we should be using" distinction which is always brought up.<p>Don't treat this comment as I'm skeptical to spaced repetition or its scientific claim. I think it's great that it's being brought up so that more people can try it out! But these articles tend to always paint this picture of the current educational system being archaic as if nothing has improved in last ~50 years.<p>> During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours at a time memorizing facts, equations, the names of the elements, French verbs, dates of key historical events. We found ourselves frantically cramming the night before a test. We probably read through our notes over and over, a gallon of coffee in hand, in the hope that the information would somehow lodge in our brains. Once the test was over, we doubtless forgot everything straight away.<p>This doesn't really match how I was <i>taught</i>. I wasn't given a list of Spanish (the third language I learnt in school) verbs to memorize. Instead each chapter started with a set of new words we were supposed to learn, and then we did a bunch of reading/writing/listening exercises where we used these words over the next few days/weeks. During the week we slowly started internalizing them and we didn't stress if we didn't knew them by heart from the first day. In the following chapters they would repeatedly bring back previously learnt words. Everyone knew that you would have to both do weekly exercises to stay on top, and then later on repeat if you wanted for it to stick.<p>Of course, in practice, I often ended up having to panically memorize something before a test, but this had <i>nothing</i> to do with me thinking this was "the best way to learn". This was because I didn't actually cared about the topic, did tons of other cool stuff instead of learning it, and still wanted to put in some effort to get a decent grade. I certainly wouldn't blame my <i>teachers</i> for the "rote memorization" I put myself under. They constantly told me that it was much better to learn slow and steady during the semester and build up understanding of the topic.<p>> We don’t learn about spaced repetition in school—something which baffles many researchers.<p>The concept of "spaced repetition" is in my opinion well-understood by most people. Everyone expects that you need to repeat in order to learn.<p>As for the elaborate system of spaced repetition where you're precisely tracking everything to optimize for retention: Which researches are "baffled" that we're not learning this in school? It's something which hasn't been practical at all until very recent times (with phones/computers), and I'd expect that most researches on learning understands that teaching in school is a multi-faceted problem and that "this one trick" isn't the magic solution to all of our educational problems.<p>> Most classes teach a single topic per session, then don’t repeat it until the test.<p>This is <i>not</i> my experience at all. In History we were always asked to compare what we learnt in different chapters. Most of Maths typically build on top of each other, and e.g. you will end up practicing basic arithmetic when you're solving quadratic equations. It felt like teachers spent a lot of time to think about how to structure the curriculum so that we had a cohesive learning experience. And often they explicitly called out when we switched to a completely different part of the curriculum. It was also pretty common to have "summary" lecture at the end of these parts.<p>> A typical spaced repetition system includes these [four] key components<p>Trust me: I was often struggling to motivate myself to even pay attention to the topics. Having this elaborate system I had to maintain would <i>not</i> helped me in school at all.