Study Shack

By seeing a fact occasionally it can memorized with little effort. This is a familiar concept to experienced studiers. They may notice that studying in portions over time produces stronger memories and develops far less stress. This is the nature of spaced repetition.

We have all had experience with spaced repetition. Which candy is the freshmaker? All we need is _____? What is the name of a radio station in your area? Now another: When did you study these? Most of us never tried to commit these facts to memory, yet they can be recalled almost instantly without effort. By seeing information occasionally our brains developed the memory without conscious effort.

Why this type of learning works is a mystery to me. It just works. It is extremely effective for learning information in a short time with ease. It is immediately applicable to courses where it is only necessary to memorize a collection of facts for an exam. It is also applicable to courses that understanding instead of memorizing is heralded like Organic Chemistry. There is an excellent article on Fear of Memorization discussing how our culture extols reasoning yet pushes away memorization, when they are in fact intertwined. Most of reasoning is memorization. It is necessary to memorize relevant information before we can reason a new problem. While critical to do practice problems for some subjects, it is possible to excel in most by only memorizing.

Khatzumoto at AJATT shares a story of how he learned about the concept Little and Often. It provided foundation for his Japanese-language learning techniques, and also gives solid ground for studying with spaced repetition. Instead of studying in 2+ hour segments for 10 days before an exam, it is only necessary to study a few minutes a day for a few weeks. Studying can be done anytime and broken up into microbite-size pieces if chosen to.

Some people have worked very hard to put together Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) to create flash cards and automatically schedule when to view the cards. The program will know which cards are difficult, and show the more often – and which are easier and need to be seen less often. I have seen people use this technique with hand-made flashcards. The advantage of SRS is that it is very easy to make, edit, search, add pictures/video/audio, share, and generally manage the cards. The program will take care of what cards it is necessary to see so we can avoid the situation of looking at the same cards that we know inside-out-backwards-forwards-and-upsidedown. By showing us only things we need to learn, studying becomes fun!

Anki is the most popular and respected SRS, and it is free. It can be downloaded here. Information the basics of how to use the program are available under the Documentation section of the Anki website. Other options include SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, and Smart.fm.

This website covers useful approaches to learning and models of how to make cards for SRS to develop memories effectively. I am sharing this information because I spent two years learning how to study the hard way while pulling myself up from a rock-bottom GPA. After another two years sinking unfathomable hours into getting high grades on science exams, I found the SRS. My study time and stress reduced so significantly that I want to share these techniques so that low and high GPA students can achieve the grades they want without missing out on life.