It Wasn't A Great Year...

It Was a Very Bad Year

Two years ago this month I bid “good riddance” to 2016 in a holiday blog on this website.  It had been a terrible year, and I looked forward to seeing it end. Others seemed to agree—tirades about the awful year in blogs and songs went viral.

Now I look back and think, “How naïve!”  I thought 2016 was bad?  I had no idea. It didn’t seem possible that the toxic climate that had dominated in the Presidential election that year could possibly get worse, but of course it has. In fact, “toxic” has just been voted the word of the year by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests how widely the word is being used to describe not only the political climate in the US, but the state of the environment worldwide, the growing refugee crises, the rise of nationalism, and the rapid decay of truth, language, civility.

But as bad as it’s been, 2018 is NOT the worst year ever.  According to a recent Time.com post by Raisa Bruner, that honor goes to the year 536 AD when a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland darkened the entire northern hemisphere for a year-and-a-half, destroying crops and leading to widespread famine. Then the bubonic plague set in killing millions across Europe.  The combined disasters undermined the economy and crippled culture, and it took over a century for Europe to recover.  THOSE were some bad years.

It helps to put our own times in perspective. This does not mean we should abandon our critical acumen and become Pollyannas; it just means we should get our facts straight before we bemoan that it is the worst of times (OR celebrate that it’s the best).

So with that in mind, I’d like to offer a different word of the year. Instead of “toxic,” I’d like to suggest that the word of the year should be “curate.”  The active verb offers us more guidance than the passive adjective—and the two are related: we all need to curate the news, tweets, texts and tv we expose ourselves to in order to prevent toxic overload. And we need to leaven our exposure to contemporary toxicity with historic context on a regular basis. Curating should not mean focusing only on what we want to read/hear/watch in order to sustain a predetermined position. It should involve being judicious about our choices in the interest of gaining real wisdom and perspective. 

And that brings me back to spaced repetition (you were wondering how this rant would relate?).  Effectively employing spaced repetition requires curating the information we are working to remember.  We can’t remember everything; we shouldn’t remember everything.  But with judicious curating, we can remember a lot, learn broadly and deeply, stay in tune with the present and the past, not get overwhelmed with information overload (a danger likely only to increase in the coming years), and dump what we don’t need.

So here’s to 2019:  I plan to spend some quiet moments early in the year curating what I intentionally choose to remember, selecting beneficial knowledge to accrue, and throwing out the rest. Happy new year, friends, and happy curating!

SRS Resource Spotlight: Anki Essentials by Alex Vermeer

This is the first of a series of short blog posts presenting different resources to support learning using SRS.

Anki Essentials is available for download at Alex Vermeer's personal website. This is an in-depth guide to getting the most out of the Anki software package. Vermeer covers basics like adding cards, card types, editing templates and various other card tweaks. He also comments on some of the more useful plugins, how and when you should be reviewing, and much much more. This is usually the first place we send someone with practical questions about Anki. Highly recommended.

Memory Aid for the Memory Challenged: An Interview with Dr. Mieke Verfaellie about Spaced Repetition

 By Dr. Natalie McKnight

I am always on the hunt for new uses of spaced repetition (SR) and also for new users of SR, particularly in my own backyard at Boston University (BU).  So I was delighted when I came across an article published by BU’s very own Dr. Mieke Verfaellie that discusses spaced repetition in relation to massed repetition and long study presentation in research on patients with memory disorders.  Dr. Verfaellie is a Senior Research Career Scientist at VA Boston Healthcare System and Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and she is also Director of the Memory Disorders Research Center. In the paper, “Benefits of Immediate Repetition Versus Long Study Presentation on Memory in Amnesia,” published in Neuropsychology (2010, Vol. 24, No. 4, 457–464), Dr. Verfaellie and co-authors Karen F. LaRocque and Suparna Rajaram establish that “like individuals with intact memory, patients with selective amnesia show improved recognition memory following spaced repetition (Cermak, Verfaellie, Lanzoni, Mather, & Chase, 1996; Hillary et al., 2003; Verfaellie, Rajaram, Fossum, & Williams, 2008) and similar findings have been obtained in patients with severe memory impairments in the context of traumatic brain injury (Hillary et al., 2003) and Alzheimer’s disease (Moulin,Perfect, & Jones, 2000).” While the main focus of the article is not spaced repetition, the statement above and the conclusions drawn at the end (i.e. that further studies should be done comparing spaced repetition vs. massed and long study presentation) indicated to me that I should approach Dr. Verfaellie for an interview. She graciously accepted.

Natalie: How and when did you first learn about spaced repetition?

Dr. Verfaellie: The use of SR is grounded in the spacing effect, a very well established phenomenon in the study of memory that is typically covered in undergraduate memory textbooks. The spacing effect refers to the fact that information is remembered better when repetition and review of the material is spaced out over time rather than when it occurs in close succession.

Natalie: Please describe for a general audience the roll of SR in your ongoing research?

Dr. Verfaellie: My interest in SR arose from working with patients with severe memory impairment (amnesia). One of the main ways to boost memory in patients with amnesia is to repeat information multiple times. But little was known about which type of repetition is most beneficial. It turns out that patients with memory disorders, like people with intact memory, learn best when to-be-learned information is spaced.

Natalie: Have you used SR for your personal learning (languages, etc.)?  If so, have you used any apps or other digital tools that incorporate SR (such as Anki, Duolingo, etc.)?

Dr. Verfaellie: I have not used any particular apps or digital tools that incorporate SR. However, in everyday life, I try to incorporate the principle of spaced learning whenever I can. For instance, when introduced to someone in a social setting whose name I want to remember, I try at various points in the conversation to use their name, or to think about it mentally as the conversation unfolds and subsequently, as I think back on the conversation. Learning names can be challenging. Spaced repetition is helpful because it allows you to encode the name more than once and link it to different parts of the conversation. This provides more cues to later retrieve the name.

Natalie: Do you think SR could or should be used more in K-12 classes?  Or in higher ed?  Why do you think it hasn’t caught on more in educational circles?

Dr. Verfaellie: I think SR can benefit learning at all levels of education. For a long time, the effects of SR were studied primarily in laboratory settings, where the to-be-remembered information is very simple (e.g., remembering a series of words or pictures). It was unclear, therefore, whether findings would generalize to classroom learning. But more recently, there have been studies in real-world educational settings using actual course content that clearly show how spaced repetition improves learning of complex information. It is particularly useful when we need to be able to use the information flexibly in different situations. Spaced repetition encourages learning of the same content in different contexts. By doing so, students are better able to recognize its broad applications.

I think one of the obstacles to implementing SR in the classroom is that teaching materials are often not organized in such a way as to promote spaced learning. But even relatively small changes, for instance, in how homework is organized – mixing material related to different topics in assignments rather than having a single assignment focus solely on one topic – can have significant impact.

Natalie: Are there any references you’d like to cite to your own publications or those of others?

Dr. Verfaellie: A good overview of considerations regarding SR in education:

SHK Kang, Spaced repetition promotes efficient and effective learning: Policy implications for instruction. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2016, Vol. 3(1) 12–19.

Natalie:  Thanks so much, Dr. Verfaellie--you’ve been very helpful!  For our readers’ convenience, here is the abstract of the spaced repetition article Dr. Verfaellie recommends above:

Concern that students in the United States are less proficient in mathematics, science, and reading than their peers in other countries has led some to question whether American students spend enough time in school. Instead of debating the amount of time that should be spent in school (and on schoolwork), this article addresses how the available instructional time might be optimally utilized via the scheduling of review or practice. Hundreds of studies in cognitive and educational psychology have demonstrated that spacing out repeated encounters with the material over time produces superior long-term learning, compared with repetitions that are massed together. Also, incorporating tests into spaced practice amplifies the benefits. Spaced review or practice enhances diverse forms of learning, including memory, problem solving, and generalization to new situations. Spaced practice is a feasible and cost-effective way to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning, and has tremendous potential to improve educational outcomes. The article also discusses barriers to adopting spaced practice, recent developments, and their possible implications.

Spaced Repetition Without Computers

By Dr Alex Strick van Linschoten

As digital devices take up more and more of our daily lives, I've been trying to find ways to decrease the amount of time I spend behind a back-lit screen. This sometimes feels a little like a form of neo-luddism, though the omnipresence of technology in the rest of my life would seem to belie this.

I've previously written for this site to extoll the virtues of Anki and other digitally-managed tools for handling the backend of spaced repetition memorisation. So how do you manage all your different 'facts' and 'cards' without Anki to handle it all for you?

I've come across two methods that allow for a low-tech approach to spaced repetition: the Leitner System and the Goldlist Method.

The Leitner System: Cards and Boxes

Originally proposed by German journalist Sebastian Leitner, the Leitner system has you write out all your facts and information onto cards and use a series of boxes to keep track of how well you are recalling that information.

The system is highly flexible depending on your needs. If you had 3 boxes, for example, the first box you would go through every session. This is where your new cards start off. If you feel confident about your knowledge of the new word, you can move it to the second box. The second box you can review every second session. If the word in the second box is something you feel confident about, it can end up in the third box (which is itself reviewed every third session) and so on. If at any point (in any of the boxes) you forget a word or fact, it goes back to the first box. In order to properly replicate the spaced repetition 'algorithm', you'd want more boxes (perhaps as many as ten) but you can hopefully see how it is flexible and doesn't require any digital technology. Note, too, that you can replicate the multiple boxes with a single box. There is also a very handy 'schedule' which you can use to even more finely replicate the spacing that Anki would have you follow. (Watch this video for more on that.)

The Goldlist Method: Anki for Accountants

The Goldlist Method was invented by David James, a linguist and accountant from the UK. I'd strongly recommend checking out the following video to get an overview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixxq8moh4pg

The basic principle is the same as with the Leitner box and all spaced repetition in general: things you learn advance through a series of 'stages', so you can focus on the words that are causing you the most trouble.

The Goldlist Method is optimised for the study of foreign vocabulary, however, and all the words are kept within a series of three A4-size notebooks.

I have used this method since the beginning of the year to learn the contents of a Dari dictionary. As something designed by an accountant, it can be said to lack excitement, though I have to say I enjoy the process and the method. I find it works more or less as well as Anki for ploughing through new vocabulary items.

Usage Scenarios

The obvious point to note with the Leitner System relates to portability and travel. Unlike with Anki or Memrise, both of which store your progress in the cloud, if you lose your Leitner box(es), you've lost all your words and all your progress.

The advantage that both systems have, I've found, is that input is quick and extremely pleasant. For all the advantages of a digital system, nobody can say that creating cards using Anki or any other system is a delight...

The Goldlist Method is extremely portable, too, consisting of just a few notebooks. If you're travelling, you can get away with just the notebooks for the immediate topics/languages that you're studying.

Have you tried any of these methods before? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of using digital methods for employing spaced repetition in your learning?

Spaced Repetition and Creativity

 By Matt Trevithick

 In 2015, I read a book called A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science Even if you Flunked Algebra by Barbara Oakley. It has some great tips, advice, and reflections on learning math and science-related material more easily. I enjoyed the book because it contained some great thoughts on inter-leavening material while studying, which I’ve tried to put into practice, as well as focused and unfocused learning.

I highlighted 18 concepts / names / sentences I found useful and created 12 cards to add to my ‘Books / Life’ Anki deck where everything from what I read that I want to remember ends up. There are some great nuggets that I review periodically:

-       The best way to avoid procrastination is to avoid focusing on the product (an outcome) and focus only on a process (like working, or writing, etc). (Kindle Location 1455)

-       We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable (Kindle Location 1254)

-       Taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most important things you can do (Kindle Location 2932)

But the single best sentence I came across, with direct implications for spaced repetition, was this:

“You must have information persisting in your memory if you are to master the material well enough to do well on tests and think creatively with it” (Kindle Location 993).

I modified this, perhaps a bit aggressively, to “the ability to think creatively requires information to persist in your memory” and have repeatedly discovered the wisdom in this concept. 

Creativity + Memorization

In my experience explaining spaced repetition, folks immediately leap to seeing spaced repetition as a boring (if functional) tool to help them overcome distant goals – graduating medical school, learning vocabulary while studying a foreign language, or writing a PhD. This view frames spaced repetition entirely as a tool to help them perform better in academic settings or settings where learning is required, and nothing else.

That is also how I started using spaced repetition, to assist me in learning Afghan Farsi while living in Kabul after Alex introduced me to it. But I then realized that I could add things in from books I was reading, finally solving the conundrum of how to remember what I was reading. My previous method was to spend weekends at a café writing out by hand things I had underlined in books into a single notebook to imprint them a bit more firmly in my brain, then re-reading those writings every few weeks. It was absurdly time consuming but helpful. But spaced repetition naturally blew it out of the water.

A year or so into using Anki on a daily basis, I started adding in basic events and notes from my own life, and the lives of friends, starting with dates and places. I then added in almost everything I found interesting or had ever looked up. It went from the profound to the mundane, and most topics in between, largely because it was fun. (As an aside, Alex and I have joked about the tendency when you first discover that spaced repetition is working to want to add in literally everything you could possibly want to know. If you're curious what that looks like, check out this video of a man who memorized his daily life for one year. The impact on his sense of time was really interesting.)

The result was that I increasingly had more data points in my head than ever before. And if creativity is nothing more than a new connection between existing ideas or dots in your head (every idea does come from somewhere) then this method would stand to greatly enhance creativity. From my own experience, this was the exact result. Courtesy of spaced repetition with its regular reviews of material, ideas and thoughts stayed illuminated in my brain, which enabled the creation of more ideas than ever before because as I went through my daily life, small and insignificant triggers would repeatedly launch new, creative thoughts.

In different words, Daniel Coyle in The Little Book of Talent discusses both the science and the art of this, with your brain re-wiring itself depending on how you are accessing thoughts. 

But the bottom line is the same: to think creatively requires points to stick in your head so you can connect them in new ways. More points, more possible connections, more creativity. 

Memorization: A Key to Creativity?

Far from being a boring tool to help you get a better grade in Spanish class, I’d posit that the creative classes – artists, poets, writers, and everyone along those lines – would also benefit enormously from using spaced repetition as a learning tool to inspire new approaches to their work. A bit of basic memorization will go a long way in helping people be more creative, innovative and original than ever before. It has certainly helped me in my creative endeavors and developing solutions to problems demanding cognitive flexibility. And if we're living in the creative economy, this would be an indispensable tool in helping us all succeed. 

---

NB: Whether the ideas are good or actionable or profitable is an entirely different issue – but the first step on this path is simply to collect ideas. Then you can put them into a list, and weed through as appropriate.

Profiling Dr. Kitt Shaffer, Space ED Expert

(By Dr. Natalie McKnight)

When Matt Trevithick began thinking about starting the Spaced Repetition Foundation, I decided to see if any colleagues of mine at Boston University (BU) were using spaced repetition in their courses or in their own learning.  A quick search of the BU website led me to a PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Kitt Shaffer, Vice-Chair for Education in Radiology at Boston University Medical Center, as well as Chair of the Boston University Medical School Faculty Appointments and Promotions Committee. Kitt has been a Radiology and Anatomy educator since the early 70's, with a PhD in Anatomy and training in Thoracic, Oncologic, and Breast Imaging. She has been Director of Medical Student Education at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Clinical Director of Radiology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Course Director for the Harvard Medical School 1st Year Anatomy Course (Human Body), and Director of Undergraduate Medical Education at Cambridge Health Alliance.  She has won many teaching awards, including the Educator of the Year for both the Radiological Society of North America and for the Association of University Radiologists, and she has written widely on digital teaching methods, including the use of spaced education. Her answers to my questions about her use of spaced repetition were extremely generous, as was her list of relevant resources, as you can see below. It quickly became clear that Kitt’s expertise on the subject far exceeds mine, and I promised her if we ever launch a Spaced Repetition Hall of Fame, she’d be one of the first members.

Question:  Dr. Shaffer, how did you first discover spaced repetition?  Were you using it for your own learning?

Kitt:  My first exposure to spaced repetition as a teaching method was during collaboration with Dr. Price Kerfoot, who conducted multi-center trials in Urology education using an innovative web-based email methodology that showed proven efficacy in a manner similar to a drug trial. Those who had repetitions of questions until they had given the correct answer twice had markedly improved long-term retention of information. In reflecting on my own learning style after this experience, I realized that I had made use of a similar (non-digital) method throughout medical school with physical flashcards. I still make flashcards when trying to learn languages, and enjoy the various computer programs that offer 'digital flashcards' and repetition of learning objects to facilitate long-term retention. One in particular that I like is called Duolingo and it presents you with repeated tasks that use different channels of learning (writing, reading, hearing) to help with language advancement.

Question: (As an aside, I also love Duolingo!) I judge by your PowerPoint that you use spaced rep in your classes.  Are you still doing so?  How do students respond? Have you collected any evidence of its impact?

Kitt:  I was a contributor to Dr. Kerfoot's* original Spaced Education website, and designed a number of different types of questions to expand on the usual multiple choice (multiple guess) format. I developed short answer question formats that could be graded by computer, through entering of all possible variations on the correct answer. In fact, I used some crowd-sourcing from participants (who would email me if they thought their answer should have been scored as correct). I also developed methods for displaying stacks of cross-sectional images (like CT and MR) using video and outlined various anatomic structures on each movie for users to identify, using fill-in-the-blank question formats. I think that the combination of short-answer (which requires more sophisticated thought processes than multiple-choice) and spaced repetition is particularly powerful. Feedback from this site was uniformly positive and for a while, it was one of the top-rated courses on the site. 

Question:  Also, it looks like you were using Spaced ED in some classes--do you still use that?  Would you recommend it?

Kitt:  As the SpacedEd site went through several technical upgrades, they were no longer able to display the videos I had uploaded, and lost interest in the short-answer formats (which take a bit more effort to input), so I don't think my course is currently available. [Editor’s note:  Google searches of “SpacedEd” lead to fairly dated sources, and links within those pages direct searchers to “QStream,” which seems to be an application of spaced repetition to industry needs: https://qstream.com/ ).

Question: Are you aware of other faculty who use it?

Kitt: As the Spaced Ed site has gone through various transformations, I have not kept up with it so am not currently using it. I do know that many of our trainees use other online flashcard programs to assist in study for board exams. I do not currently use any of these in my teaching. I have begun using a free audience response program (Socrative) for short-answer questions as part of my interactive teaching with radiology trainees, but have not tried doing a spaced repetition of the same questions, which is actually a great idea. I may try that going forward. I think it would solidify the things I am trying to teach them in a meaningful way. I love this idea!

Question: Your online PowerPoint lists some very helpful references--do you recommend any others?  (One of my recent favorite finds is:  Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (2014) by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel).

Kitt:  As references, I would recommend all of Dr. Kerfoot's articles* on his work in Urology. It is really an amazing body of research, and I have not heard of anyone else who has done such sophisticated validation of the spaced repetition concept. The results are very impressive. If spaced education was a drug, we would all want to take it! 

Question:  Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Kitt: I have also become interested in designing educational websites for a flipped classroom approach that I use in large group teaching for medical students and physician's assistant students, and when you think about it, that is really a form of spaced repetition. Learners are asked to look at information on their own before class, and then it is shown again in class for a second repetition. Learners then have access to the same information on my website going forward, which has potential for a third repetition (or second, if they did not do their initial homework). If you want to see the website, the URL is http://www.shafferradiology.com  It would be very interesting to design a study to see what the impact of viewing the material ahead of time is on the actual learning and retention that occurs. A multi-center prospective trial like Dr. Kerfoot has done would be the ideal, but most of us mere humans are not as energetic or dedicated as he is!

*Here is a list of references that Dr. Shaffer recommends:

1: Kerfoot BP, Turchin A, Breydo E, Gagnon D, Conlin PR. An online spaced-education game among clinicians improves their patients' time to blood pressure control: a randomized controlled trial. Circ Cardiovasc Qual Outcomes.

2014 May;7(3):468-74. doi: 10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.113.000814. PubMed PMID:

24847084; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4040124.

2: Kerfoot BP, Baker H, Pangaro L, Agarwal K, Taffet G, Mechaber AJ, Armstrong EG. An online spaced-education game to teach and assess medical students: a multi-institutional prospective trial. Acad Med. 2012 Oct;87(10):1443-9. PubMed

PMID: 22914524.

3: Kerfoot BP, Baker H. An online spaced-education game for global continuing medical education: a randomized trial. Ann Surg. 2012 Jul;256(1):33-8. doi:

10.1097/SLA.0b013e31825b3912. Erratum in: Ann Surg. 2012 Oct;256(4):669. PubMed

PMID: 22664558.

4: Kerfoot BP, Baker H. An online spaced-education game to teach and assess

residents: a multi-institutional prospective trial. J Am Coll Surg. 2012 Mar;214(3):367-73. doi: 10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2011.11.009. PubMed PMID: 22225647.

5: Kerfoot BP, Shaffer K, McMahon GT, Baker H, Kirdar J, Kanter S, Corbett EC Jr, Berkow R, Krupat E, Armstrong EG. Online "spaced education progress-testing" of students to confront two upcoming challenges to medical schools. Acad Med. 2011 Mar;86(3):300-6. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182087bef. PubMed PMID: 21248600.

6: Kerfoot BP, Lawler EV, Sokolovskaya G, Gagnon D, Conlin PR. Durable improvements in prostate cancer screening from online spaced education a randomized controlled trial. Am J Prev Med. 2010 Nov;39(5):472-8. doi:

10.1016/j.amepre.2010.07.016. PubMed PMID: 20965387; PubMed Central PMCID:

PMC2994103.

7: Kerfoot BP, Fu Y, Baker H, Connelly D, Ritchey ML, Genega EM. Online spaced education generates transfer and improves long-term retention of diagnostic

skills: a randomized controlled trial. J Am Coll Surg. 2010 Sep;211(3):331-337.e1. doi: 10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2010.04.023. PubMed PMID:

20800189.

8: Long A, Kerfoot BP, Chopra S, Shaw T. Online spaced education to supplement live courses. Med Educ. 2010 May;44(5):519-20. doi:

10.1111/j.1365-2923.2010.03678.x. PubMed PMID: 20374457.

9: Kerfoot BP. Adaptive spaced education improves learning efficiency: a randomized controlled trial. J Urol. 2010 Feb;183(2):678-81. doi:

10.1016/j.juro.2009.10.005. PubMed PMID: 20022032.

Spaced Repetition Systems - Rough Notes on A New Frontier

 (By Matt Trevithick)

Overview

Spaced repetition should be used for much more than memory tricks and learning languages. Having directly managed a team of researchers and employees of varied backgrounds since 2013 at the company I co-founded, I see enormous potential for the introduction of spaced repetition as a learning tool to augment the daily lives and workflows of employees. We are not even at the beginning of how this technology could be used to make enormous, quantifiable improvements in the workplace, resulting in better output and happier employees.

SRS Overview – Some Popular Current Uses

• Used for education – some medical school students are particularly fond of it, though its popularity stems from students trying to help each other out in the face of an enormous amount of memorization rather than any university initiative to ease the burden students are facing. Unfortunately, most students I've interacted with simply stop using it after their formal education is complete or they've passed the test they were studying for. 
• Used for language acquisition – Famously Chinese and Japanese, though Alex, Natalie and I use it for other languages.
• Use for personal development – incredibly time-consuming, I use to this to add into my cherished Anki deck “Books Life” everything I find interesting from what I’m reading. This process involves a few cups of strong coffee on a weekend morning, where I download my Kindle notes and go through them, looking up the basics of an event, name, piece of art, or some other underlined text.

Though there are of course other uses, in general, approaches involving this technology are highly individualized and require large amounts of time to bring to fruition. This helps explains the lack of any formalized adoption by organized groups of people. 

SRS In the Workplace – A New Frontier

The workplace provides – outside of the university – perhaps the single most appropriate location for daily, incremental improvement, with all the requisite incentives that will keep people accountable.

Potential Uses

• On-board new employees
• Use to learn new procedures
• Reinforce training programs for staff
• Reinforce key themes and messages from important events / presentations
• Learn new concepts before heading to a place (businessmen to a foreign country, etc)

Impact

• Minimal – only studying what you don’t know
• I envision a system ultimately developed that is customized for the Monday-Friday workweek, requiring less than five minutes per day
• No other system available takes less time
• No other system delivers the results SRS does

Accountability

Use of this software could be  directly to employee performance reviews. On one end of the spectrum, simple and lightweight reminders (nudges) could be created to remind employees to accomplish this daily task. At the other end of the spectrum could be something as simple as not allowing employees to log into their computer until the questions have been answered first thing in the morning. 

Potential Pitfalls to be Avoided - Ideological Resistance

Resistance to this concept of learning / improvement comes from all corners, even from expected allies. Much to my surprise, I’ve found the most stalwart opponents of learning (I’m aware I’m using a loaded term here that is breathlessly debated) often have PhDs attached to their signatures. My very first meeting with a group of academics in Boston this past summer, where I excitedly laid out my thoughts about developing a platform that would allow for the development of spaced repetition systems far beyond what was currently available, ended on a sour note after I found myself unexpectedly trying to explain to university professors why it was important to remember bits of information, particularly over time (which itself carries staggering implications for the creation of the first ever genuinely effective life-long learning system). This was attacked as rote memorization and I was unprepared to address this point.

In subsequent discussions, I’ve approached this concept from the perspective of creativity and helping students (or employees) come up with ideas about what they’re studying, which goes down a bit better. The analogy is simple – if creativity / new thoughts are nothing more than the link of two (or more) bits of information in your head, then the most important step is to have as many bits of information as you can in your head. The more dots to connect, the more ideas, the more creativity, and the more thinking that occurs.

Potential Pitfalls to be Avoided - Workplace Resistance

If rolled out incorrectly, this system could provoke an intense and fierce backlash from employees who will resent what they perceive as yet another intrusion into their lives – another standard to keep in mind, another regulation, etc. This issue must be handled very sensitively by company administrators, who also must ensure that the employee is learning only material directly useful to their performance. This means keeping deck sizes under control.

There will be grumbling through the first few weeks of the rollout, but through daily use, the total burden of the program should reduce to one or two minutes as well as days where there is no material to review, assuming administrators have been responsible with determining exactly what is necessary to be included in the decks.

Thought: Slowly phase in more material. Perhaps create a limit of a deck to just 100 cards initially, studying 20 new cards per day. More cards can be added incrementally once or twice per month or on set schedules.

Conclusion

We are not even at the beginning of how this technology could be used to make enormous, quantifiable improvements in the workplace. With employees in particular, I see the adoption of this service as something that could dramatically improve employee performance (meaning a happier, more efficient employee, not an additionally-burdened employee) through better comprehension of company policies, expectations and procedures. This is an extension of the concept of the brain exerting less energy to accomplish tasks which it understands well or are routine.

For adaptation to a company, the burden is almost entirely with senior management to ensure that the rollout is done carefully and steps are taken to ensure that this simple system is implemented in a way that is minimally invasive. The anticipation of negative reactions is critically important and must be prepared for.

But should it be done well, it just might (almost assuredly) result in significantly more educated and productive workforce.

Holiday, Memories, Spaced Rep - And Good Riddance to 2016

(By Dr. Natalie McKnight) 

Ask Americans to name a favorite song, and most will oblige with several. But ask them to sing or say the lyrics and most will fail miserably.  But ask them—regardless of religious affiliation—to state lyrics from a Christmas carol and most will be able to do at least a halfway decent job.  Or ask them to name a favorite short story or novel—most will come up with something; but ask them to give you the plot and most will botch it.  But ask them to tell you the Christmas story, most will come up with the basic elements, even if their only real experience of it is Linus reciting the version from the book of Luke in Charlie Brown’s Christmas special (a perennial favorite, and one of the best recitations of the story I know of). Most will also be able to come up with the basic plot elements of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol too, even if their main experience of it is the Muppet version, or a streamlined version they did in grade school.  Our memories of the songs and stories of Christmas are so strong because holidays by nature have spaced repetition built into them intrinsically—every year, at the same time, we resurrect the same rituals so that before long they really stick.  Annual repetition may not be the best interval for effective spaced repetition memorization, but it’s still effective.  Even songs and stories that we really like cannot compete in our memories with the ones that annual rituals replay.

            Spaced repetition as a means of learning new material offers a means of reproducing the holiday formula with a more systematic spacing, timed to combat one’s ‘forgetting curve.’ But holiday rituals stick with us for reasons that go beyond repetition:  the way the rituals appeal to all our senses helps to deepen the memories.  The smell of Christmas trees, the feel of snow, the sound of carols and bells, the sight of Christmas lights twinkling at twilight, the cinnamony smell and taste of holiday cookies—these light up multiple areas of the brain thereby creating more complex neural connections. Repeated complex neural connections = strong memories = deep learning.  When I’m teaching literature or philosophy classes, I often try to use a similar appeal to the senses to bring 3-dimensionality to words and abstract concepts. By highlighting correspondences between the words and the art, architecture, music—or even food—of the same place and time, I attempt to establish a structure for the new knowledge that will help students understand, reflect on, retain and apply the information.

            Which brings me back to spaced repetition.  Could spaced repetition be enhanced by sensory stimuli? I’m not thinking of aromatherapy index cards here (although that could be done, and why not?).  But could burning Arabic incense while reviewing my Arabic deck heighten my remembrance of what I’m studying? Or might listening to salsa music while studying my Spanish vocabulary enhance my learning? If nothing else, these practices and others like them would at least make the studying slightly more enjoyable, and that in itself is probably worth it.  I might just try out this theory and report back about it in 2017 . . .

             And speaking of the new year, I know I’m not alone in wishing 2016 a speedy adieu.  It’s been a terrible year nationally and globally (and for me personally as well).  People are writing and posting songs about the awfulness of the year (my favorite is this one here, definitely worth checking out). Some might say 2016 is a year better left forgotten. But I would not agree, in spite of my overall disgust with the last 12 months. Our memories - the bad and the good - make us who we are. They connect us with our former selves, with those we love, even with strangers, when we discover similar memories in vastly different lives. Memories make us human. Bury them or try to lop them off, and you become less human, you develop pathologies. So, I'll remember 2016, but I hope - for all of us - that 2017 is a better and more happily memorable year. 

How I Use Spaced Repetition in My Daily Life and Work

(By Alex Strick van Linschoten)

Maybe Spaced Repetition isn't the best word. It's only descriptive after the fact, once someone has explained to you about Ebbinghaus and his experiments learning sheets of random numbers during the 1870s. For a general audience, we probably need a better term to help people understand what you can do with Spaced Repetition. We also need better examples and models of people who use it in a variety of domains of their life.

The first use case or scenario in which many encounter spaced repetition software or uses is language learning. And yes, it is great for learning vocabulary in an efficient manner. You can see how people have found ways to blast through large numbers of words by using things like Anki or Memrise.

But it would be a waste to limit our understanding of what Anki or spaced repetition can do to just learning vocabulary lists. It can be used for so much more. Indeed, expanding people's awareness of the various possibilities is an important reason why Matt, Natalie and I decided to set up this foundation.

With that in mind, I wanted to take a few moments to write down some thoughts on how you can use Anki and Spaced Repetition in other areas of your life. This list isn't in any particular order. You'll find that most things involving information or learning can be somehow coupled with the use of spaced repetition software, and the extent of your use is basically only as limited as your creativity.

- Birthdays -- learn all the birth dates of your friends and family. This probably works best in conjunction with some other system like the major system for remembering numbers, but you might be able to brut force this through.
- Kindle Clippings -- using Anki's in-built cloze deletion tool, you can blank out key parts of your kindle clippings to remind you of things you read in previous months or years. This way, books that you've read needn't be confined to vague memories. You can be more deliberate about what you're learning. Even things like book titles could be something you could learn with Anki. Consider a card which tests me on the author's name and the title (based on a short description). This way I avoid having those moments where I forget the title of the book but remember the contents pretty well.

- Magazine articles / things online as you're reading
I do this a lot. Whenever I'm reading online articles -- in Instapaper, let's say, which is the place where I read most things -- I'll save the highlights of passages I want to keep in my reference library. At a later date, I'll go through those highlights and see what I want to remember for the longer-term. I'll then transfer the clipping or highlight into my Anki library.

- New English words -- I'll occasionally come across technical vocabulary that is new to me while readying. If it's a word that I find myself looking up often, I'll save that entire sentence into Anki and use the cloze deletion method to set up an appropriate test.

- People / Faces
Matt seems to use this far more than me, though I'm starting to do it more often. The idea is that you find a picture of people you meet in meetings or in work contexts (Google Images or Facebook works well for this) and test yourself on their names and maybe one or two key facts about them -- that they're a vegetarian, perhaps, or that they just had a baby, or whatever it is. You can even do this pre-emptively. I once did this prior to a conference/event on Afghanistan. The conference home page had everyone's name and photo (those who were speaking / attending) so I just downloaded the lot, made cards for everyone as well as what their job/specialism was. By the time I arrived at the conference I knew everyone's name and who they worked for and what they worked on. It was a far more relaxed and personable experience than previous events of that kind. I don't get invited to speak at such events any more really, so I have no use for this, but I imagine many readers would find this useful.

- Reference materials -- You probably have things in your life that you're perpetually looking up. The time in-between looking-up probably is a matter of months (or maybe years). Just long enough to forget, but not long enough to forget that you once knew this thing. With Anki, those tip-of-the-tongue moments can become a feature of the past. No more remembering that you once new something.
Some examples: perhaps the precise proportions of a recipe you make every  month or two. Yet every time you make the recipe you have to look up whether it is 1 part flour to 2 parts water, or 1:3. Anki can keep your memory fresh.
Similarly with important medical data, or phone numbers, or points of contact for certain work projects or people.

- Coding language -- I used this while studying coding this past summer, and have found it great for making sure that the conventions I learnt for one language didn't get forgotten while I worked on the next language / scenario.

- Revising things you should probably already know but maybe have forgotten
This, for me, is the subject of mathematics. I studied it at school, but since then have had less need for it. This past year I've returned to mathematics with the somewhat embarrassing realisation that even things like my times-tables aren't as solidly in my brain as I'd like. I can tell you what 6x7 produces, but I'll probably need to think about it for a few seconds. Enter, Anki. I've been drilling myself on times tables for a few months and have found a real uptick in the speed at which I can recall those answers.

- Geography
You probably did a certain amount of this at school, but since then haven't added to the knowledge (or some maybe has been forgotten). Learning all the capitals of all the countries of the world (and being able to locate them on a map) isn't just an abstract skill. Things like this enhance your ability to understand and interact with the world. Instead, when you read a news article referencing a number of countries, you can place them on a map and realise that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso and that it's included in the article for that reason.

Other niche things I've used Anki to help me with:
- brewing times for different varieties of tea, and also the ideal temperature of the water
- Ayas for the Qur'an (i.e. learning to recite these by heart). I know many use Anki for learning Bible verses, too.
- Learning the periodic table (alas, many years ago, in a deck now since deleted from my phone)
- The Japanese Kanji

Others use Anki for learning med-school data.

As I wrote above, the limit to what you can use Anki for is basically limited only by your creativity and imagination.

Conversion - My Version

(By Dr. Natalie McKnight)

I used spaced repetition (SR) happily for years without realizing it.  By the time I first heard the term from Matt Trevithick, who drew an intriguing diagram of the process on a napkin at a Boston University awards dinner, I was already an unknowing convert having successfully used SR with the Pimsleur system to strengthen my French and learn basic conversational Korean and Arabic. I’d used a range of language learning systems previously, from traditional classes to self-study methods using a variety of audio tapes, books, computer programs, etc.  Everything worked a little; nothing worked well. And then Pimsleur. And then I learned why.

            Spacing the repetition of new words, concepts, and structures and interleaving new material with old material truly does build long-term memory in a way that massed repetition (i.e. cramming) simply cannot do.  And yet massed repetition is still the norm for students studying in K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities.  And we all know that the cramming students do to prepare for exams leads predominantly to short term memories that quickly get dumped to make way for more short term memories which also get dumped. So pervasive is this frustrating pattern that I simply cannot understand why more people have not migrated to spaced repetition when it’s been around for over 100 years and many reputable studies have demonstrated its effectiveness. Matt Trevithick created the Spaced Repetition Foundation to disrupt the traditional and futile learning patterns we’ve all witnessed and to get the word out about a more effective technique.  He invited Alex Strick van Linschoten to join him as Alex was the one who introduced Matt to SR, and he invited me along for the ride, knowing that I too was a true believer, and an educator interested in improving learning.

Why does memorization have such a bad reputation?

            We (the Spaced Repetition Foundation) have had numerous conversations with academics who dismiss SR as being ‘only’ about memorization, as if memorizing was a rudimentary and inessential process and beneath their notice.  In their minds, memorization is lower-level learning and seems disconnected somehow from higher learning, such as critical and creative thinking.  They root their assumptions in Bloom’s Taxonomy (and we have had Bloom’s Taxonomy spouted to us ad nauseum).  For those of you unfamiliar with the taxonomy, in 1956 Benjamin Bloom published an approach to classifying learning that has “Knowledge/Remembering” at the lowest level and “Evaluation” as the highest level, the apex of the taxonomy’s triangle. Cognitive psychologists have since offered revisions to Bloom’s rather rigid and hierarchical taxonomy, and educational researchers increasingly embrace a more complex and recursive understanding of learning.  But Bloom still has many die-hard fans quick to brush off memorizing things as lower-level learning.  And these dismissive responses are as over-simplistic as the taxonomy itself.  They suggest an either/or fallacy in which one can strive either for memory OR for critical thinking but not both, when in fact you can’t really engage in good critical thinking without a good memory of facts and concepts from which to draw connections, comparisons, and derive inferences. 

            The authors of Make it Stick (Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel) make this point very persuasively when they describe a pilot dealing with a drop of oil pressure in one engine, and the range of information he needs to remember to find a creative solution to the problem:

The pilot ran a mental checklist, figuring his options. If he let the oil pressure get too low he risked the engine’s seizing up. How much further could he fly before shutting it down? What would happen when he did? . . . . He reviewed the tolerances he’d memorized for the Cessna 401.  Loaded, the best you could do on one engine was slow your descent. But he had a light load, and he’d burned through most of his fuel.  So he shut down the ailing engine, feathered the prop to reduce drag, increased power on the left, flew with opposite rudder, and limped another ten miles toward his intended stop.  There, he made his approach in a wide left-hand turn, for the simple but critical reason that without power on the right side it was only from a left-hand turn that he still had the lift needed to level out for a touchdown. (1-2)

The authors conclude that the pilot’s thinking in this situation epitomizes what they mean by learning:  “we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities” (2).  No one loves Google-searching more than I do, but sometimes a Google search just won’t do the trick. Sometimes, you just need to remember things.