Keeping track is an odd term. It suggests you know in the moment what you learned and then forgot. That’s not key issue when it comes to measure meaningful learning.
The key feature of real knowledge is that it can be used to achieve desired goals in the future. If you there are no possible goals with which information that you studied helps you, then you haven’t learned anything.
While I personally don’t want to invest the necessary effort to aquire a foreign language, they are good examples:
You want be able to speak French while taking a vacation in France without needing to switch language. This is testable by actually taking a vacation in France.
It’s also testable by taking a CEFR language level test. A friend once told me that while studying a new level himself he took all the CEFR test for each level. This allowed him not only to know when he had enough knowledge to make it in France but also measure his progress.
Measuring progress this way is useful because it tells you whether your learning approach actually works. If you for example just use Anki with French cards, you might feel like you are making progress because you learned more Anki cards without actually moving to the ability to speak French. Using the CEFR language level test on the other hand actually tracks your ability to use the language.
Good measurements differ from subject to subject and require thinking about about what matters that’s easy to access in your topic.
Keeping track is an odd term. It suggests you know in the moment what you learned and then forgot. That’s not key issue when it comes to measure meaningful learning.
The key feature of real knowledge is that it can be used to achieve desired goals in the future. If you there are no possible goals with which information that you studied helps you, then you haven’t learned anything.
While I personally don’t want to invest the necessary effort to aquire a foreign language, they are good examples:
You want be able to speak French while taking a vacation in France without needing to switch language. This is testable by actually taking a vacation in France.
It’s also testable by taking a CEFR language level test. A friend once told me that while studying a new level himself he took all the CEFR test for each level. This allowed him not only to know when he had enough knowledge to make it in France but also measure his progress.
Measuring progress this way is useful because it tells you whether your learning approach actually works. If you for example just use Anki with French cards, you might feel like you are making progress because you learned more Anki cards without actually moving to the ability to speak French. Using the CEFR language level test on the other hand actually tracks your ability to use the language.
Good measurements differ from subject to subject and require thinking about about what matters that’s easy to access in your topic.