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
Conversation
(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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Replying to
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.
I found that surprising too. But yeah, our median typed answer length is only one word. And with MCQs you've gotta read four options vs typing one.
Self-graded recall is in that chart, labeled as "Self-Graded Flashcards"
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Whoops, don’t know how I missed that! Thanks for clarifying.