Mini-experiment report: How does the *order* of SRS prompts affect memory formation?
When and I first built quantum.country, we did the easy thing: sort by due date. But that order would perpetuate itself; people would see mostly the same sequences. 👇
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Many people brought this up in user interviews. It made them uneasy: were they taking cues from the stable order? Would they remember if prompts were shuffled?
So in December, we started shuffling the prompts… but we kept 20% on the old behavior, to see what changed.
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I predicted accuracy rates would drop a few pp. But now we have data from ~200 readers' first two repetitions of every question, and we see no change in recall.
Like twitter.com/andy_matuschak, though, I suspect it's important *emotionally*. Haven't validated with interviews yet.
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In September we added a "retry" step to Quantum Country. If you forget something, you'll review it again later that session.
Other systems do something like this, and interviews suggested that readers needed to feel seen+supported when forgetting.
Does it help accuracy? (con't)
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