162 cards
Memory is not a passive recording; it is a reconstructive process that decays rapidly without reinforcement. Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve shows the shape of that decay: roughly fifty percent of newly learned material is lost within an hour and around seventy percent within a day. The curve's steep early drop i...
Spaced repetition counteracts the forgetting curve by timing reviews to land just before forgetting would occur. Each successful recall pushes the next review further into the future, gradually flattening the curve. Distributed practice - spreading study across many days - beats massed practice (cramming) by wide margi...
Most modern spaced repetition software is built on SuperMemo-2, the algorithm devised by Piotr Woźniak in the mid-1980s. At each review the user grades recall quality on a 0–5 scale: 0 for total blackout, 1 for incorrect but familiar, 2 for incorrect but easy once the answer is shown, 3 for correct with serious difficu...
The whole point of a flashcard is active recall, the mental act of producing an answer before you flip the card. If you flip first and read the back, you have just performed recognition, which feels like success without the deeper retrieval the card was built to produce. Production-style cards, which ask you to "define...
John Sweller's cognitive load theory explains why instruction must respect the limits of working memory. Intrinsic load is the inherent complexity of the material; extraneous load is wasted by poor design; germane load is the cognitive effort invested in building schemas. Effective instruction minimizes extraneous load...
Several techniques force the kind of engagement that produces real understanding rather than the appearance of it. The Feynman technique is to explain a concept in simple terms as if to a twelve-year-old, identify the gaps that surface in that explanation, return to the source material to fill those gaps, and simplify...
Metacognition is thinking about one's own thinking - knowing what you know, knowing what you don't, and adjusting strategies accordingly. Within it, calibration refers to the accuracy of your confidence in your own knowledge. Beginners tend to overestimate themselves, the Dunning-Kruger effect, because they don't yet h...