←back to thread

Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

(domenic.me)
636 points domenicd | 3 comments | 18 May 25 11:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
bearjaws ◴[18 May 25 12:34 UTC] No.44020922[source]▶
Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now.

Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.

There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.

A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)

You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.

replies(11): >>44020936 #>>44020982 #>>44021067 #>>44021102 #>>44021143 #>>44021340 #>>44021407 #>>44022192 #>>44022229 #>>44022370 #>>44022435 #
1. hiatus ◴[18 May 25 13:01 UTC] No.44021102[source]▶
I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.
replies(1): >>44021352 #
2. InkCanon ◴[18 May 25 13:39 UTC] No.44021352[source]▶
This is a very big problem. Virtually all the results from research here comes from some form of simple word recall. Direct recall occupies some part of real world tasks, but IRL if you're stopped by doing something it's people not because you can't remember it (and you could look it up if you forgot).
replies(1): >>44023953 #
3. aswegs8 ◴[18 May 25 20:04 UTC] No.44023953[source]▶
It's just logical that memorization is useful for broad areas like vocabulary and get progressively worse the more depth is involved, e.g. vocabulary>grammar>maths. The first one doesn't require generalization, the last one most certainly does. Even though I find that SRS leads to good generalization if it is used for relatively shallow conceptual knowledge.