Practical example: Which of the following is [xyz]? [A] [B] [C] [D]
I did made hundreds of Anki cards on that basis with 2 to 3 answers and my conclusion is that it's a bad idea. Given "what fires together wires together" cards like that seem to create links between the question and the wrong answers.
For example, if we have x number of cards in a typical deck, can we grade the usefulness of each card?
The typical deck is going to be different for different people.
I did made hundreds of Anki cards on that basis with 2 to 3 answers and my conclusion is that it's a bad idea. Given "what fires together wires together" cards like that seem to create links between the question and the wrong answers.
There's also a risk that you become dependent on being able to look for the answer visually rather than being able to fish it out of year head; in most real-world cases, it's the latter skill you need.
Have you considered sharing some version of this essay with your students? I think one of the bad things about conventional schooling (generalizing from myself) is getting the impression that the whole thing just happens, rather than that there's adult thought going into how teaching is done.
In re reading for pleasure: even if it isn't something you're teaching, at least you aren't spoiling it for your students.
I'm looking forward to your next installment.
Have you considered sharing some version of this essay with your students?
This question makes me squirm a bit, which makes me think it might be important.
I do discuss the rationale behind my course design choices with students, in some limited domains. I should have mentioned in this report that I've tweaked my intro-to-SRS presentation I gave at the start of last year; I now bill it as a kind of superpower, and we have some cards in our deck about the principles of it -- cards that still get some play even this late in the year. I hope this may create more of those "sleeper agents" I speculated about, who may bloom into power-learners down the road.
I also make sure my students understand how valuable I think pleasure reading is, with a different presentation that spruces up the more interesting findings from that report I linked to. And I put my money where my mouth is by making sure they understand how very unlikely I am to give them a hard time for reading during my class, even if it's not exactly what they're supposed to be doing.
I even try to let them know why each unit is in our curriculum, whether it's "because the boss/district/state says so, but we'll try to make it fun" or "because I want to help you get into college and I know this will help".
But a lot of my thinking I don't share. I understand some of my reticence: there are things I do that wouldn't work as well if they knew I was doing them, and there are other things that would be exploitable if I laid out the strategies behind them. I'm struggling to articulate the rest of my hesitation, though.
Like the stuff about apathy and caring. I had some experimental lessons dealing with this sort of thing about 7 years ago when I taught a course with a broader curriculum mandate. I don't feel like these lessons got a lot of traction, though, in the same way that other "life skills" lessons tend to fall flat with typical teens. This age group is so slippery... so reluctant to accept advice where others would see it, so wary of anything that smells of paternalism.
My instincts now tell me to approach these things obliquely, as though I'm accidentally letting out the secrets I know they're too immature to make use of. I'm not telling them what they should do. I'm talking about how the rash actions of young characters in our stories make sense because said characters don't understand how adolescent brains are wired for overconfidence and short tempers. I'm making a seemingly off-hand comment about the rare superpower of "taking advice". I'm giving an off-script response to a question about my past with an answer about that time I totally kicked butt by putting in extra hours of effort, as though this were a cheat giving me a secret edge.
I remember being a teen and thinking much more deeply about the things adults seemed to let slip than about their prepared remarks. It hadn't occurred to me until now that some of those slips might have been carefully scripted.
Along these lines, I have embraced the power of Cloze deletion. I have no problem with keeping all of the following cards in rotation:
The [...] is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a [...] in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which [...] suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons [...].
Even if I don't actually care about memorizing the wording verbatim, breaking the information up this way forces me to learn the information in a sort of "anisotropic" fashion.
edit: Also, yes, at least two of these cards would be dead-easy, practically already known before I saw them even once, but seeing the information "too much" at the start can help push you over the initial hump.
It should be noted that how the cloze cards play out changes greatly depending on whether you allow different cards of the same note to show up on the same day. One version gives you that early overload effect, while the other gives a kind of extended familiarity effect where for months you'll probably have at least one variation of that cloze come up every day or two. The more variations on a note, the longer this stretches out.
The problem in Anki, at least, is that this is a global deck setting ("Bury related reviews until the next day") and not one you can customize for individual notes. Maybe I should start organizing decks by desired automaticity levels rather than by content.
Tangentially related: I have found the ease of creating cards one of the most important factors determining the speed at which I learn. For example in anatomy, I started with making cards from a photographic atlas, but this took way too long. (I still desire to make cards from them, since they use actual photos, not simple schematics). For the later, I had to manually cut out the images, and extract the labeling. In contrast, what I ended up using was Gray's Anatomy for Students Flash Cards. It's a 817 page book, with most of it in being alternating pages of images and corresponding names.
This was much easier to make (digital) flash cards from. With pdftk, I could separate the pages into a file of all images and a file of all assorted labels. With pdftotext I could easiliy convert the pdf of labels into text (which I could simply, ~automatically form into flash cards) while I used imagemagick to extract the images themselves. (with all the borders, etc, cut off.) (while I have done a part of the conversion process manually (some names were split into multiple lines, and there were minor irregularities in the text format of the file, so I manually made each section into a separate flashcard (Inserting headers of a card, deleting newline characters if splitting an item into two, and marking the beginnings and endings of clozes), but I am certain that that could've been easily automated, with a proper understanding of regexps. (learning which would've been more economical on my time)). With all this, it took me 13 days until I had first exposure to all 3630 cards, probably significantly less, than if I had to do everything manually.
So, whenever you can, automatize.
(Before this, I used to extract glossaries of books manually. Obviously, I use the same tools for that too, now.)
I learned to love books which had great glossaries, and great summaries. Some are so great, that by reading the summaries, you don't even have to read the actual chapters. (Which may be artificially inflated in length because of a length goal the publishers set, or because it is more targeted towards entertainment value, than for quick conveying of the ideas behind them. A quick skimming may still be worth it, though, even if in preceding chapters you established that their compression is pretty lossless.) Only tables are better.
One thing I want to add to my current toolset is a way to automatically extract wiktionary definitions: sometimes the whole idea is in there, but either way, speaking the language of your desired subject by the time you encounter the more in depth books is handy. (this, coupled with a trickle system, AKA (~20) word(s) of the day)
I used to try to avoid duplicate cards, but I learned to love redundancy.
Also, mind sharing your cards for the holonyms?
You know, I had a start-up idea along these lines recently: something that would combine SRS with social bookmarking.
Example: I'm slowly-but-steadily working my way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I have it on good authority that few people make it as far as I have. I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I stop to make cards for terms, concepts, and many of the examples. I take days or weeks away from the book between sessions while I let those facts firm up in my head, and then I resume.
While I hold that there is real value to making cards yourself when this involves putting things into your own words, making a high-quality card is also a time-consuming chore that is just as much about formatting. I've often wished, as I read, that I had a browser extension that would let me pluck pre-made cards out of a side-bar that went with the passage I was reading -- cards by one of the thousands of people that have no doubt come before me in that chapter.
You can see how this might work. People could build karma when others copy their cards. Site creators might create their own cards as a way to help readers and boost traffic, or pay bounties of some kind to others who make them.
You could browse other cards by the writers of cards you've cloned, and all cards would have automatic links to the sites they go with -- getting around a big problem with imported cards, which is that they are shorn from their creation context.
Monetization? Maybe ads in the corner of the side-bar or something. Maybe partnerships with popular for-pay learning sites.
There are no doubt some thorny copyright issues at play though, and the overall potential market is probably pretty small.
What I am suggesting is that in "knowing one card", they have thoroughly decided to commit to knowing the password in this one field. They are essentially checking out from doing anything other than reciting the surface concept back at you. potentially finding a way to cheat their way to the applause lights.
I wonder if it would be possible to trick them into changing the goal from "correctly recite this password" to, "get every password right".
The exact link escapes me but someone suggested a concept that is useful to think about is, "The Desire To Pass Tests", which if your student has, can be all it takes to succeed. What do you think of TDTPT?
I think all of these strategies give the type of student I'm talking about too much credit, as they are mostly emotional creatures not prone to strategic planning. I guess TDTPT comes closest, but I would change it to a phrase I use with my students: "It's fun to be right." IFTBR.
Easy trivia apps were all the rage among my students a couple years ago. Nobody was trying to get a high score or trying to advance to the next level, but if you put a question in front of someone that they think they know the answer to, the urge to get validation for knowing it is irresistible. You've probably seen ads on the internet that work on this principle.
It's why Who Wants to Be a Millionaire always started off with insultingly easy questions, and why easy cards in the class Anki deck are so important for raising participation and morale.
I don't give it mostly because few of my students would do it; they are not strongly motivated by grades.
Hm. I was about to suggest that the natural way to get daily Anki compliance is to have that be homework--it should be easy for students to send you some record / to find or build a webapp where you can see whether or not students are reviewing their cards.
(This runs into trouble with digital access; students may have a hard time getting on the Internet on Saturdays or Sundays. But for many schools this isn't a problem.)
Monitoring features are definitely a part of the vision I'll be laying out in the next post, but more as a way to make classroom time more productive than as a homework enforcement aid. To get them to use something on their own time I'm going to have to be more clever, and make them feel like it was their idea.
my classes continue to perform with increasingly minimal note-taking and homework.
Which homework hasn't been assigned because of Anki? Remembering back to my high school English classes, the only homework I can remember doing was reading readings and writing essays. I can't see how either could be displaced by Anki.
I've cut back on note-taking quite a bit thanks to Anki. They weren't looking up those notes anyway. If they want them bad enough they can look them up on my web page or go straight to the Anki cards.
Anki hasn't displaced much homework, though, as there wasn't much left to displace. I don't give it mostly because few of my students would do it; they are not strongly motivated by grades. This is especially true of reading homework; I gave up on that a year after I stopped teaching honors after getting about 10% compliance. Reading happens in class or not at all, and yes, it is a big challenge to squeeze this in and still do all of the other things we need to do. It's important, though. For most of my students, the reading we do together is the only reading-at-length they do all year. They admit this readily -- even proudly.
Essays are more mixed. We don't do too many full ones, and the ones we do mostly get done in class. The "homework" is there just as safety valve for those who care enough to make their essay great.
This is an excellent review. Thank you; please keep writing!
A few aspects of behaviours you have described seem to be the behaviour of students trying to guess the teachers passwords, and shortcut the learning process.
Things like:
Does this seem like an accurate insight into their behaviour to you?
Good question, but no, I wouldn't say these students are trying to guess the password. The cards they're remembering aren't complex enough to qualify. The answer is the answer, not a surface representation of some deeper knowledge they're skipping.
This feels more like a case of selective attention, of perking up and caring more about cards they see as "in their wheelhouse". It's an easy way of being better than everyone else at something, even if that something is pretty narrow. If you've ever done any cooperative social gaming, you can probably recall analogous situations where new players spontaneously start seeing themselves as specialists with some power-up, weapon, player class, etc. It's a land grab for the ego, and mostly just harmless fun.
Remembering passwords takes effort; a mystical incantation is harder to memorize than an answer you can logically derive from deeper knowledge. Hence, password guessing is something I mostly see in students who are grade obsessed, and I don't get too many of those.
This is a follow-up to last year's report. Here, I will talk about my successes and failures using Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) in the classroom for a second year. The year's not over yet, but I have reasons for reporting early that should become clear in a subsequent post. A third post will then follow, and together these will constitute a small sequence exploring classroom SRS and the adjacent ideas that bubble up when I think deeply about teaching.
I experienced net negative progress this year in my efforts to improve classroom instruction via spaced repetition software. While this is mostly attributable to shifts in my personal priorities, I have also identified a number of additional failure modes for classroom SRS, as well as additional shortcomings of Anki for this use case. My experiences also showcase some fundamental challenges to teaching-in-general that SRS depressingly spotlights without being any less susceptible to. Regardless, I am more bullish than ever about the potential for classroom SRS, and will lay out a detailed vision for what it can be in the next post.
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How old are your students?
14-16, usually. These are 9th and 10th graders, with a few repeating upperclassmen.