From what I understand of the literature, free recall produces better learning compared to cued recall like flash cards. Part of the reason is that it forces you to organize information and associate it with existing knowledge.
Anecdotally, it's much easier to learn conceptual knowledge, and I don't really feel like my recall of specific facts has suffered compared to traditional SRS.
- Front of card is the entire LC problem statement
- Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I would do blah blah..)
- Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance through or look at a particular part of it.
"Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50 minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ... there was no statistically significant difference in learning effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for teaching the material."
https://g5m.cs.washington.edu/
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfDJ5nla8UpwShx-lzLJqcp5...
I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process.
Can GPT/chatGPT help here ? If yes, how ?
And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good guide.
1. Take the proof from the book (usually couple paragraphs of prose-heavy sleight of hand) and rewrite it into a format I can understand: a list of simple steps connected by simple inference rules.
2. Split them up until each proof is 5-7 steps.
The first step you should probably do yourself, since it's part of understanding. The second step GPT can probably help with.
I’ve dreamed of having some app that mixes in bite sized learning lessons with otherwise “fun” internet (social media, news, etc.)
I could imagine it could give you a little tutorial and then ask you a quiz (to force application). If you get it wrong it keeps you at the same concept and explains it a different way next time, maybe asks if you want to revisit prereqs.
Even if you can’t memorize the answers, you can change your understanding and intuition.
Front of card: where to find the problem (e.g., book, page number, problem number).
Back of card: where to find a solution (e.g., solution manual, page number, maybe a personal notebook with cleanly written solutions, etc.).
I initially tried writing up the problem and solution in Anki, but that was too much of a hassle and realistically I'm not gonna be reviewing problems without the book in front of me anyway.
English: there are thirty days in April.
French: il y a trente ___ en avril
The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This combines vocabulary with grammar.
I didn't like the Clozemaster UI so I wrote a script to make the clozes myself: https://borretti.me/article/building-diy-clozemaster
But automatic approaches are not great. Later I asked GPT-4 to make these flashcards for me, that gave me much better/more meaningful results.
[0]: https://www.clozemaster.com/
[2]: https://www.clozemaster.com/faq#how-are-the-blanks-in-the-se...
For language I've always used the sentence in target language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card and the translated sentence in the back of the card but I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around.
Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach
It should be both ways round. This is especially true for languages (where your brain needs e.g. French -> English for reading/listening and English -> French for writing/speaking). It's also useful even where you only need one direction because learning both directions actually strengthens the memory for the direction you need.
I was wanting to get back into French and thought about using chatgpt, but I'm worried about it's hallucinations and teaching me wrong.
Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.
As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.
On further reflection I found that those cards just were an attempt at avoiding actually practicing something, but this isn't really possible. If you want to be good at solving integrals, than you do actually have to solve lots of integrals. Anki will not make you proficient at this if you don't also put in the time to frequently solve integrals. Instead what it can do for your is keep the various techniques for integral solving close to the surface, so that you can relearn them much quicker if you haven't solved any integrals in months. You skip the step of having to rediscover all the techniques.
Personally, I dislike having every app implement (or not) it's own version of SRS, so I combine language apps with Anki. For each lesson in an app, I make an Anki card which simply tells me to revisit that lesson. I then put those cards in a special deck with customised settings with larger review gaps so that I'm not overwhelmed with time-consuming lessons.
So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.