My girlfriend is in nursing school. She had been doing well on here tests until recently, when she marginally failed a rather important exam. Anki came to mind as tool that may help her through the upcoming tests this semester, as it seems many people here at LW speak very highly of it. I’m looking for some general 101 help and suggestions in regard to Anki...
Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be effective?
As I try to come up with questions, I realize I’m pretty incompetent at even knowing what to ask… Any knowledge you think would be useful would be appreciated. Thanks!
Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be effective?
People don’t have something like inherent learning styles. They have strategies for learning.
Using Anki is a learning style.
One frequent error when making Anki cards is to think that the card should contain the solution to an exam question. That leads to cards that are too complicated.
Some psychologists and neuroscientists have questioned the scientific basis for and the theories on which they are based. According to Susan Greenfield the practice is “nonsense” from a neuroscientific point of view: “Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain.” Many educational psychologists believe that there is little evidence for the efficacy of most learning style models, and furthermore, that the models often rest on dubious theoretical grounds. According to Stahl, there has been an “utter failure to find that assessing children’s learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on their learning.”
A non-peer-reviewed literature review by authors from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne identified 71 different theories of learning style. (...) Coffield’s team found that none of the most popular learning style theories had been adequately validated through independent research, leading to the conclusion that the idea of a learning cycle, the consistency of visual, auditory and kinesthetic preferences and the value of matching teaching and learning styles were all “highly questionable.”
an adequate evaluation of the learning styles hypothesis—the idea that optimal learning demands that students receive instruction tailored to their learning styles—requires a particular kind of study. Specifically, students should be grouped into the learning style categories that are being evaluated (e.g., visual learners vs. verbal learners), and then students in each group must be randomly assigned to one of the learning methods (e.g., visual learning or verbal learning), so that some students will be “matched” and others will be “mismatched”. At the end of the experiment, all students must sit for the same test. If the learning style hypothesis is correct, then, for example, visual learners should learn better with the visual method, whereas auditory learners should learn better with auditory method. (...) studies utilizing this essential research design were virtually absent from the learning styles literature. In fact, the panel was able to find only a few studies with this research design, and all but one of these studies were negative findings—that is, they found that the same learning method was superior for all kinds of students (...) As a consequence, the panel concluded, “at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number.”
So it seems to me that it’s actually a lot of different theories, and none of them has an experimental proof. The evidence seems to actually point the other way.
My interpretation is, if you start using pictures in your class and you get better results, that’s not because you have finally provided something useful to the “visual learners”, but because you have provided something useful for everyone.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Anki allows you to create many “fields” for the card, but you often need two (question, answer) or four (question, footnote for question, answer, footnote for answer). Start now.
Don’t worry about creating too many cards, or getting your answers wrong. You learn even by getting wrong answers. The only failure is to stop using Anki. -- Unless the questions are badly designed, in which case don’t hesitate to redesign them. For example if there are two questions you often confuse with each other, try replacing them with a question “what is the difference between X1 and X2?”.
Create some schedule for using Anki. For example: “the first thing after I start my computer”.
I’ve been using Anki for the past few months, and recommend it for learning things. It’s also a good way of making use of a daily commute.
The Lesswrong Wiki has pointers to some of the places it’s been discussed here.
As a quick summary:
Make your cards super easy (the answers should be a single word as much as possible, and you should be able to answer it very quickly)
Use cloze deletion; eg if you want to learn “As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area and is released in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.”, you might make cards with:
“As part of the ???? pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area”
reward
“As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in ???? located within the ventral tegmental area”
nerve cell bodies
“As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ?????”
ventral tegmental area
Create Anki cards yourself, don’t use pre-made decks
Enter stuff in Anki once you have a basic understanding (i.e. after reading about it or having a lecture etc. - not directly entering facts witout processing them)
Make cards that ask for pretty much the same information several times (definition of a concept, what’s the concept of this definition, such-and such is an example of which concept, etc.)
Review in little sessions dispersed through the day
Delete stuff if it feels useless / too difficult. If it’s too hard, best to delete it and make several easier cards.
The problem I’ve seen with trying to sell people on Anki in the outside world is that many places will give you printable flash cards. An easy way to get these into Anki would go a long way.
The problem I’ve seen with trying to sell people on Anki in the outside world is that many places will give you printable flash cards. An easy way to get these into Anki would go a long way.
Coverting them depends entirely on how the cards are formatted. If you get them in some digital file you could convert them into a table and import them into Anki.
However the more I use Anki the less I think of Anki as flashcards and the more I think of it as a new medium.
With a stack of printable cards you go through the cards till you think you know them all. You usually try to review similar cards together. With Anki you don”t review similar cards together but spread them out over time.
People often want to brute force information into their brain with flashcards while Anki is primarily about making sure that you can remember what you learned.
Anki help needed...
My girlfriend is in nursing school. She had been doing well on here tests until recently, when she marginally failed a rather important exam. Anki came to mind as tool that may help her through the upcoming tests this semester, as it seems many people here at LW speak very highly of it. I’m looking for some general 101 help and suggestions in regard to Anki...
Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be effective?
As I try to come up with questions, I realize I’m pretty incompetent at even knowing what to ask… Any knowledge you think would be useful would be appreciated. Thanks!
People don’t have something like inherent learning styles. They have strategies for learning. Using Anki is a learning style.
One frequent error when making Anki cards is to think that the card should contain the solution to an exam question. That leads to cards that are too complicated.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good introduction to how SRS works.
Could you expand on this? (Or point me to something already written.)
Perhaps wikipedia would be a good starting point.
So it seems to me that it’s actually a lot of different theories, and none of them has an experimental proof. The evidence seems to actually point the other way.
My interpretation is, if you start using pictures in your class and you get better results, that’s not because you have finally provided something useful to the “visual learners”, but because you have provided something useful for everyone.
Could you define a question? There seems to be a lot of things that I could say on the topic.
Are you talking about basically the same stuff in Viliam_Bur’s comment?
Did you mean to say “strategy” instead of “style” here?
Thanks.
Don’t overcomplicate it. Anki allows you to create many “fields” for the card, but you often need two (question, answer) or four (question, footnote for question, answer, footnote for answer). Start now.
Don’t worry about creating too many cards, or getting your answers wrong. You learn even by getting wrong answers. The only failure is to stop using Anki. -- Unless the questions are badly designed, in which case don’t hesitate to redesign them. For example if there are two questions you often confuse with each other, try replacing them with a question “what is the difference between X1 and X2?”.
Create some schedule for using Anki. For example: “the first thing after I start my computer”.
Gwern’s article is a good place to start.
I’ve been using Anki for the past few months, and recommend it for learning things. It’s also a good way of making use of a daily commute.
The Lesswrong Wiki has pointers to some of the places it’s been discussed here.
As a quick summary:
Make your cards super easy (the answers should be a single word as much as possible, and you should be able to answer it very quickly)
Use cloze deletion; eg if you want to learn “As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area and is released in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.”, you might make cards with:
“As part of the ???? pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area” reward
“As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in ???? located within the ventral tegmental area” nerve cell bodies
“As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ?????” ventral tegmental area
Create Anki cards yourself, don’t use pre-made decks
Enter stuff in Anki once you have a basic understanding (i.e. after reading about it or having a lecture etc. - not directly entering facts witout processing them)
Make cards that ask for pretty much the same information several times (definition of a concept, what’s the concept of this definition, such-and such is an example of which concept, etc.)
Review in little sessions dispersed through the day
Delete stuff if it feels useless / too difficult. If it’s too hard, best to delete it and make several easier cards.
The problem I’ve seen with trying to sell people on Anki in the outside world is that many places will give you printable flash cards. An easy way to get these into Anki would go a long way.
Coverting them depends entirely on how the cards are formatted. If you get them in some digital file you could convert them into a table and import them into Anki.
However the more I use Anki the less I think of Anki as flashcards and the more I think of it as a new medium.
With a stack of printable cards you go through the cards till you think you know them all. You usually try to review similar cards together. With Anki you don”t review similar cards together but spread them out over time.
People often want to brute force information into their brain with flashcards while Anki is primarily about making sure that you can remember what you learned.