There are lots of reasons to measure a person’s ability level in some skill. One such reason is to test your understanding in the early stages of learning a new set of concepts.
You want a system that’s:
Fast, intuitive
Suggests what you need to spend more time on
Relies on the textbook and your notes to guide your next study activity, rather than needing to “compute” it separately.
Flashcards/reciting concepts from notes is a nice example. It’s fast and intuitive, tells you what concepts you’re still struggling with. Knowing that, you can look over the material, then just try to recite the concept again. Each time, it hopefully gets more intelligible as well as memorable.
Same is true for doing problems. You get stuck, then refer back to an example to get a clue on how to proceed.
So then for a long-term learning endeavor, you just define a “practice session” as a certain chunk of flashcards/concept review or practice problems. Might be best to define it in terms of amount of material to review, rather than a sheer amount of time to spend. For example, you could define a “practice session” as “recite all proofs/concepts once from memory, and complete 3 practice problems.”
You can then distribute those practice sessions spaced out over time as needed.
There are lots of reasons to measure a person’s ability level in some skill. One such reason is to test your understanding in the early stages of learning a new set of concepts.
You want a system that’s:
Fast, intuitive
Suggests what you need to spend more time on
Relies on the textbook and your notes to guide your next study activity, rather than needing to “compute” it separately.
Flashcards/reciting concepts from notes is a nice example. It’s fast and intuitive, tells you what concepts you’re still struggling with. Knowing that, you can look over the material, then just try to recite the concept again. Each time, it hopefully gets more intelligible as well as memorable.
Same is true for doing problems. You get stuck, then refer back to an example to get a clue on how to proceed.
So then for a long-term learning endeavor, you just define a “practice session” as a certain chunk of flashcards/concept review or practice problems. Might be best to define it in terms of amount of material to review, rather than a sheer amount of time to spend. For example, you could define a “practice session” as “recite all proofs/concepts once from memory, and complete 3 practice problems.”
You can then distribute those practice sessions spaced out over time as needed.