In SRS design, Anki and Quantum Country ask you to think of the answer; Duolingo and Execute Program ask you to input an answer.
I’d thought: latter’s likely more effective, but annoying & slow. Surprised to see these studies found little diff in recall: andymatuschak.org/files/papers/L
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(See chapter 6, which describes the three experiments. Some limitations: targets were Swahili–English word associations; performed on smallish sample of undergrads; maximum retrieval interval of a week. This thesis is intensely interesting throughout!)
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More accumulated notes on self-grading vs. machine-grading in SRS design:
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One fun oddball: at least as of Dec ’17, Quizlet presents a multiple-choice input the first time, then transitions to text input / self-graded afterwards. The theory is that recognition is easier than recall, so maybe makes sense to “bootstrap” that way.
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I wonder how this turned out! The cogsci as I understand it could go either way:
+: performance on initial trial strongly affects subsequent forgetting
–: "desirable difficulty”; recall promotes slower forgetting than recognition
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I wonder if it may also help limit the reinforcing effects of struggling too long to recall before giving up
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Possibly! The Quizlet blog post shows suggests that time spent on multiple choice vs. *typing* are very similar, which I find surprising (it doesn’t show self-graded recall timing). Probably mostly vocab-centric, like much of Quizlet.
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We haven't run a well-controlled experiment w/ and w/o the MCQs, but judging by our high first attempt correctness rate for MCQs (~88%), there may be a risk of being too easy.
We've since added a short pre-test to let students "test out" of the MCQs
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Nice, thanks for sharing!
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Have you heard of Brainscape? It's like Quizlet, but it's all self-graded instead of machine-graded.
(For math teachers, it's way better because you can put images on both sides of the flashcard, e.g., an image of a formatted equation on one side and a graph on the other).
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Yep! Do you use it in your classes? If so, I’d be curious to hear about how you integrate it into your lesson plans.
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