Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

Comment by hiAndrewQuinn 4 days ago

You need to measure long term remembrance of the material, not short-term learning. A 5% increase in the speed of children learning a fact for the first time doesn't matter if the fact has disappeared from all their brains 6 months later, but to accomplish the latter at scale, there's no substitute - you need some kind of spaced repetition system. Otherwise you may as well have not taught the fact at all, and let them spend the time having fun or getting some exercise instead.

dagss 3 days ago

Is your idea that 6 to 15 year olds are going to suddenly discover Anki cards on their own and start using them? How high is that %?

I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.

(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)

And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).

The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).

I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.

There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).

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dambi0 4 days ago

I don’t think education is purely about remembering facts.

For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.

Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.

Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.

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hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago

>[O]ften we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
I've never found remembering the simplified explanation to be a hindrance to learning the more complicated explanation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have found times where forgetting the simple explanation before ever getting to the more complicated one meant it felt like I was learning the complicated one from scratch.
>[W]e want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
You can't learn any of that stuff without having the facts at hand first, however.
More importantly, "recall" is a much broader subject than it may sound at first: The ability to tackle novel mathematical theorems is based largely upon one's recall of prior proofs, which I have found to be just as valuable a target for spaced repetition approaches as any. But even if it turned out that wasn't the case, simply separating one's school day into an hour or two of "recall work" followed by 5-6 hours of "dynamic work" where we work with and elaborate upon facts that everyone in the class is statistically guaranteed to remember sounds like a much better use of one's time.

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alkonaut 4 days ago

I have no idea what the actual science referenced here is on this but I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".

And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...

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hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago

>I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
Likewise, I'm sure that science is weaker than it first appears.
I can point you to dozens of studies showing spaced repetition is robust and effective, across a wide variety of domains.
>[S]paced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
In fact I only found out about spaced repetition near the end of high school, so no, I wouldn't call it "part of education since forever". In fact I consider the fact it isn't a topic we scream about from the hilltops and make it a known thing for students a great civilization-wide error. It seems closer to an open secret that was a lot less well known even just a decade ago.
It's also not "slightly" easier with a PDF, it's much easier. Individual cards that would take much longer to create by hand (image occlusions in particular) take less than a minute with software. There is a reason I insist upon using ebooks these days, paper books just can't compete with that kind of efficiency.

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- alkonaut 3 days ago
  
  How is your particular description of spaced repetition really even relevant to the discussion?
  Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium. ”But I can scan my pdfs and make flash cards” isn’t really an argument that applies to most children I think. So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
  Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday. Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
  This is about this question: with learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
  
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  hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago
  
  >Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium.
  >Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday.
  No, you genuinely can't. Your example shows exactly why. First, your whole time horizon is bounded within a single week; second, reviewing the same thing every day for 4 days in a row is horribly inefficient, as anyone who actually went through that in school is apt to remember. Your example is also bound to a single week, which means the average topic will be remembered for a month at most afterwards - that's not a good long term learning outcome at all. That adds up to 16 years where you walk out with 99% of everything you did just forgotten, and that's just pointless.
  For proper long term retention of anything, we need something that not only lasts longer than a week, but that can persist across grades. A SQLite database can do this. I have a lot less faith in any human-meditated lesson plans doing this.
  >So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
  I follow this process with my own family, but ideally one's teachers should take responsibility for teaching and making sure students continue to do their Anki reps. It's borderline negligent not to.
  >Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
  Counterexamples abound to this. You are speaking to one.
  Many, many students happen upon the life-changing magic of the humble flashcard, even without the force multiplier of a spaced repetition system. In middle school my class was required to use them for the first month of a foreign language, where we were expected to learn about 25 new words per day. After that, they were optional.
  Nearly everyone who did well in the class continued to create and use these flashcards, because they simply worked much better than any other technique. This was a pattern which persisted all the way through high school. Of those who didn't, one cannot say it was because they had no experience with it - they simply chose not to invest the extra time and energy the flashcards required. But if this technique is so efficient, and its results so robust, then we should consider that an egregious misallocation of school time itself! And don't get me started on what could be possible with software-based spaced repetition flashcards, which are easier to make and much easier to time correctly.
  >[W]ith learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
  My experience still suggests ebooks win hands down. The benefits are obvious. The real problem here is not the technology, but the distractibility of the students. Disconnect the device from the Internet during study hours, or hire an IT admin capable of maintaining a proper whitelist - whatever, but solve the real problem. Don't go back to the horse and buggy because people are too addicted to joyrides in the Fiat.
  
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  alkonaut 3 days ago
  
  ”If schools used different methods in education then mediums would have benefits there”
  Teachers want the medium that gives the best results for the process they are using, one can assume. If that process is suboptimal that’s a different, perhaps much harder thing to change.
  It’s of course quite possible that the methods used by teachers are identical, inferior or superior to those you suggest. Or that they are the best methods for the mediums that exist (causing a kind of chicken and egg problem)
  But I think the only relevant discussion here and now is how these teachers given their education and their mandated study plans (and methods) optimize their education, and what science has to say about that.
  To draw a parallel to reading for other purposes, I’d never manage to get through even a short novel on an e-ink reader much less a screen.
  I print any scientific articles I have to read on paper otherwise they are much much harder to understand.
  Anecdotal and N=1 but I don’t think I’m alone in my Fiat.
  
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