[HN Gopher] The Spacing Effect
___________________________________________________________________
The Spacing Effect
Author : durmonski
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-01-23 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| judofyr wrote:
| I've been reading a lot around this "spaced repetition" movement
| over the years and also tried it out sometimes myself. However,
| I'm still kinda a bit confused about this supposedly big "rote
| memorization I learnt in school" vs "spaced repetition which is
| what we should be using" distinction which is always brought up.
|
| Don't treat this comment as I'm skeptical to spaced repetition or
| its scientific claim. I think it's great that it's being brought
| up so that more people can try it out! But these articles tend to
| always paint this picture of the current educational system being
| archaic as if nothing has improved in last ~50 years.
|
| > During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours
| at a time memorizing facts, equations, the names of the elements,
| French verbs, dates of key historical events. We found ourselves
| frantically cramming the night before a test. We probably read
| through our notes over and over, a gallon of coffee in hand, in
| the hope that the information would somehow lodge in our brains.
| Once the test was over, we doubtless forgot everything straight
| away.
|
| This doesn't really match how I was _taught_. I wasn 't given a
| list of Spanish (the third language I learnt in school) verbs to
| memorize. Instead each chapter started with a set of new words we
| were supposed to learn, and then we did a bunch of
| reading/writing/listening exercises where we used these words
| over the next few days/weeks. During the week we slowly started
| internalizing them and we didn't stress if we didn't knew them by
| heart from the first day. In the following chapters they would
| repeatedly bring back previously learnt words. Everyone knew that
| you would have to both do weekly exercises to stay on top, and
| then later on repeat if you wanted for it to stick.
|
| Of course, in practice, I often ended up having to panically
| memorize something before a test, but this had _nothing_ to do
| with me thinking this was "the best way to learn". This was
| because I didn't actually cared about the topic, did tons of
| other cool stuff instead of learning it, and still wanted to put
| in some effort to get a decent grade. I certainly wouldn't blame
| my _teachers_ for the "rote memorization" I put myself under.
| They constantly told me that it was much better to learn slow and
| steady during the semester and build up understanding of the
| topic.
|
| > We don't learn about spaced repetition in school--something
| which baffles many researchers.
|
| The concept of "spaced repetition" is in my opinion well-
| understood by most people. Everyone expects that you need to
| repeat in order to learn.
|
| As for the elaborate system of spaced repetition where you're
| precisely tracking everything to optimize for retention: Which
| researches are "baffled" that we're not learning this in school?
| It's something which hasn't been practical at all until very
| recent times (with phones/computers), and I'd expect that most
| researches on learning understands that teaching in school is a
| multi-faceted problem and that "this one trick" isn't the magic
| solution to all of our educational problems.
|
| > Most classes teach a single topic per session, then don't
| repeat it until the test.
|
| This is _not_ my experience at all. In History we were always
| asked to compare what we learnt in different chapters. Most of
| Maths typically build on top of each other, and e.g. you will end
| up practicing basic arithmetic when you 're solving quadratic
| equations. It felt like teachers spent a lot of time to think
| about how to structure the curriculum so that we had a cohesive
| learning experience. And often they explicitly called out when we
| switched to a completely different part of the curriculum. It was
| also pretty common to have "summary" lecture at the end of these
| parts.
|
| > A typical spaced repetition system includes these [four] key
| components
|
| Trust me: I was often struggling to motivate myself to even pay
| attention to the topics. Having this elaborate system I had to
| maintain would _not_ helped me in school at all.
| aesthesia wrote:
| I found this article [0] by a teacher who experimented with
| using formal spaced repetition systems in a classroom
| insightful. There were clear differences between motivated and
| unmotivated students, as you note. He ultimately decided that
| its utility was narrow, and that keeping students from
| forgetting facts is not the most important part of education.
|
| [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F6ZTtBXn2cFLmWPdM/seven-
| year...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Out of order:
|
| To your second point (people understand repetition): The
| difference is in the name, repetition is well-understood but
| spacing is the key distinction. Daily reviews of the entire
| deck? Useful, bordering on cramming, but no spacing. Weekly
| reviews? Still not spacing (in the SRS sense). Split a deck
| into new and easy cards, with easy reviewed less often?
| _Pushing_ towards spacing, but probably still on a regular
| interval (to the extent any student can maintain a consistent
| study schedule).
|
| Spaced repetition works by (as I said in another comment)
| roughly doubling the interval between studying the easy cards.
| Eventually you'll have delayed too long on some cards and
| forgotten them, they get restarted, if totally forgotten, or
| studied with a reduced interval if it was hard but not totally
| forgotten. The interest in optimality is, for me,
| uninteresting. When I used it by hand (with flashcards) I just
| wanted something better than studying a whole deck daily or
| forgetting large chunks of it by waiting too long. It worked,
| it wasn't "optimal" (Anki and others gets closer to that) but
| it was much better than previous efforts.
|
| To your first point: I think I agree with you. The complaints
| about rote learning are grossly exaggerated in many cases. I
| know it happens, and often in early subjects like arithmetic
| (it's hard to get a 4- or 5-year-old student to _understand_ 2
| + 2, but you can certainly get them to correctly compute it).
| But it 's not the typical treatment if your teachers are at
| least half-decent. Part of the issue is that rote learning has
| become a pejorative, equated with learning without
| understanding. The reality is that it's a tool. Drills
| reinforce the information so that you can recall and apply it
| later. SRS fits into this by being (at least for many, if not
| most cases) a more efficient approach. But even Dr. Wozniak
| doesn't encourage SRS en lieu of other approaches:
| http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm. SRS is an
| alternative to heavier drills, but it's not a replacement on
| its own for developing understanding.
| gumby wrote:
| > Everyone expects that you need to repeat in order to learn.
|
| The US English word "practice" is called "repetition" in a
| number of languages, including English outside the US.
| PianoGym wrote:
| If anyone is interested in seeing Spaced Repetition applied in
| different areas besides language and vocabulary. I have a free
| website called Piano Gym that lets you do use spaced repetition
| with Piano and sheet music.
|
| It's pretty spiffy, and I can go on at length about it. I have a
| video explaining it here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4
|
| And a long form interview explaining it here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrDAC6ZYGHk
|
| I personally use Piano Gym and I've found it to be pretty helpful
| in getting you to a point of practice and reading sheet music.
| But there's always more work to do for some of my more ambitious
| features. However it's a free tool and I have to make my money at
| my job. So enhancements come out slow.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| These kinds of articles show up here frequently and I'm curious
| how people apply this to their actual work. Makes a ton of sense
| for school, but day to day how is this used by tech
| professionals?
| Mezzie wrote:
| As somebody who discovered how effective this was by accident
| in university (I studied 6 natural languages which is all
| memorization, so this strategy was key to not going insane), I
| would use this to, for example:
|
| * Memorize keyboard shortcuts or commands for new programs
|
| * Memorize key differences/things that I get mixed up
| frequently
|
| * Memorize key details or flow for a meeting
| presentation/discussion with non-tech people
|
| * Memorize things about your team members/co-
| workers/organization at a new job
|
| * Memorize important dates or times (this works in one's
| personal life too)
|
| The idea is that my brain power is finite and by using spaced
| repetition, I make as many things as possible 'auto-pilot' for
| my brain in order to leave more brain space for problem-solving
| and deep thinking.
| dymk wrote:
| I'm using a couple of different SRS applications to learn
| Japanese. It's an incredibly useful tool for when you need to
| commit a lot of bulk content to long-term memory.
|
| Does it help with higher level critical-thinking-problem-
| solving work? Probably not. But one must walk before one can
| run, and to run, one needs a foundation of bulk-facts to work
| off of (in my case, kanji readings / meanings / particles).
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I would argue that the single biggest application of spaced
| repetition today is the repost.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706280
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565987
| friedman23 wrote:
| I use apps like codewars.com to refresh my skills. Things like
| SQL which I don't really use every week (or every month) but
| when I need it, I really need it. Or languages I am just
| interested in keeping my skills fresh with.
| hayesall wrote:
| Gwern's "Spaced Retention" post suggests applying it to
| recognizing correct syntax for fragments of Haskell code:
|
| https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
| gumby wrote:
| Being in school and being out of school ended up not being that
| different for me. I did a lot of practical stuff in school and
| have continued to read and study since leaving (30+ years ago).
|
| I guess this spaced repetition process is something I
| implicitly do -- when I kept paper notebooks I'd go back and
| read through each as I finished it. Now I have a monthly review
| of the month's notes.
|
| Also I try to use things I learn, which often sends me back to
| my notes or a book (I remember better what I read on paper).
| This obviously makes more sense with computing and chemistry;
| it doesn't typically link up the same way with, say, history
| :-).
|
| Also if I read a book that sticks in my mind, I go back to it
| and flip around for the parts I found interesting. That's also
| a kind of spaced repetition. I'm in a book club with several
| nerd friends; I couldn't tell you the dozen books we read last
| year but two of them I could expound upon at length.
|
| And of course at my age it's waaay easier to learn new things
| as I have so much context to anchor it to. As a student
| everything was new and almost _sui generis_ so it didn't
| "stick" as well. For example, reading Strang is quite different
| now compared to when I took his class 30 years ago.
| davesharff wrote:
| It's interesting. I think you are correct about your approach
| having an implicit space repetition component, and that's
| actually one of the two principles underlying the power of
| structured spaced repetition: it's how we already learn
| anyways. By anchoring the process explicitly to the
| forgetting curve[1] it simply makes it more efficient.
|
| You can see it everywhere: non-fiction books are often padded
| with redundancy as a sloppier form of spaced repetition,
| people often only remember other's names after using it
| several times, etc.
|
| The other principle is recall > re-exposure. Outside of
| highly emotional experiences, one of the best ways to encode
| a new memory, paradoxically, is to remember it. But to
| achieve this means our notes have to be converted into
| something like flashcards, so instead of reviewing them, you
| are always giving yourself a pop quiz. It takes me a long
| time (if ever) to remember how to get somewhere if I use
| Google Maps. If I have to find it myself, even once, I am
| very likely to remember.
|
| As someone whose absent-mindedness is a constant low-level
| existential crisis (what are we but our memories?), I'm
| motivated to extend the process beyond the straightforward
| flashcard material within subjects like computing and
| chemistry. I really don't think history, general musings, or
| personal interactions are any different. It just isn't as
| obvious at first. Some non-traditional examples:
|
| Q: What restaurant did Bob recommend for me to visit the next
| time I'm in Seattle? A: x
|
| Q: What behavior adjustment did you tell your partner you are
| going to make to improve your communication? A: x
|
| Of course you can do the same thing with facts in history
| _and_ with your personal takeaways from the information.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve
| kd5bjo wrote:
| I use a Zettelkasten system for keeping notes about my work.
| Every note I write gets put into an Anki deck as a Cloze
| deletion, which helps me remember what's actually in my notes
| files and occasionally brings up new, unexpected connections
| between ideas.
| qumpis wrote:
| Can you elaborate on your approach? Do you try to keep the
| context of a note? Do you automate it somehow?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| I use Obsidian for my notes; the only automation is some
| light quality-of-life stuff available in its core plugins.
| For example, I have a separate tag for each stage of the
| process, so I can work a step at a time instead of a note
| at a time. Also, my ad-hoc notes stick around as a
| collection of links to to evergreen notes that were
| extracted from them without extra effort on my part.
|
| During the day, I'll write down anything that I think's
| worth remembering. Usually that's how something I've read
| or done might affect my work in the future, but sometimes
| it'd just an interesting relationship I'd not noticed
| before or something random that catches my fancy. This
| either goes in today's daily note, or a
| reading/bibliography note if it came from a book or article
| I was studying. Maintenance is my first task every morning:
|
| 1. Do all of my outstanding Anki reviews
|
| 2. Extract yesterday's ad-hoc notes into evergreen notes,
| and file them appropriately. This is the most time-
| consuming part of the process, because I need to determine
| which of my existing notes are related and include cross-
| references. The filename of the new note is constructed to
| place it adjacent to whatever preexisting note is most
| closely related. I may also need to write some support
| notes here, if the new note relates to something I know but
| hasn't gotten a note yet.
|
| 3. Copy the text of all the new notes into Anki, and black
| out some key words in the second half of the card. I have
| Anki set to an aggressive schedule, so that I don't get
| bored of seeing any of the cards: 2,7, and 30 day intervals
| for learning, and then a 4x growth rate after that. The
| cards also include the ID, so that I can find them again in
| my notes.
|
| I don't usually bother with a lot of detail in my notes;
| for that I can always go back and look up a proper
| reference. Instead, I focus on what problems different
| approaches are good at solving, how different things fit
| together, and anything else that might help me pick _which_
| technique to reach for in any given situation.
| madiator wrote:
| Instead of coining a new term, why not call it by the name
| everyone uses: spaced repetition?
|
| One of the best articles I have read on this is by Michael
| Nielsen: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
| aidepast wrote:
| The spacing effect is utilized by spaced repetition.
| blagie wrote:
| There isn't an "everyone else." Education research has silos,
| with different jargon for the same thing, and different
| definitions for the same words.
|
| Here's another one at you: graduated interval recall
|
| Close enough to the same thing. Different words. Plus, you have
| a bunch of related vocabulary, like forgetting curves.
| dymk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect
|
| it's not a new term
| lekevicius wrote:
| Interesting thing: it's hard to take a step into Personal
| Knowledge Management / note-taking / learning systems, and not
| discover the unreasonable effectiveness of Spaced Repetition
| Systems.
|
| However, these ideas were not even hinted at while I was at
| school, time and space particularly dedicated to learning, and
| supposedly, learning how to learn.
| kiba wrote:
| Education was divorced from laboratory psychology, thus no
| cross fertilization.
| throwoutway wrote:
| I didn't hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn't flash
| cards essentially the same thing?
|
| In spelling bees they'd tell us to keep practicing the words we
| got wrong though we should have kept practicing the ones we got
| right a little longer too
| mrob wrote:
| I only knew of flash cards as a tool for cramming before
| exams.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Flashcards are used in spaced repetition systems (typically),
| but the difference is the "algorithm". There is a deliberate
| delay between reviews in spaced repetition that you may or
| may not stumble upon accidentally with flashcards. At a rough
| approximation, you want to double (more or less) the time
| between reviewing cards _if_ you know them before seeing them
| again. Most people studying flashcards won 't do that on
| accident, at best they'll move the easy cards to another pile
| and review them at _some_ point in the future, but it may be
| either too soon or too late.
|
| In the too soon case, it's probably fine. Not ideal, but
| fine. They'll have more "this is still easy" cards than if
| they waited a bit longer. In the too late case, though,
| they'll have forgotten more material and have to restart
| cards more often. In a semester long course the too soon case
| is preferable (more studying than necessary to commit things
| to memory, but more things in memory), the too late case will
| mean more cramming at the end.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > I didn't hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn't
| flash cards essentially the same thing?
|
| No, they're completely orthogonal IMO. SRS is a scheduler;
| when do you see a piece of information, based on how well you
| remembered it the last time you saw it.
|
| The card is just the info itself. Going through a set of
| flashcards every day is not SRS; it completely misses the
| first S.
|
| Many SRS' USE flashcards, but the important bit is the
| scheduling.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Well yeah, in themselves cards don't have the S, but even
| their most basic basic usage of separating wrongly answered
| ones from the rest and repeating those again adds it back
| to a degree.
|
| There are also versions where you put successfully repeated
| cards into the next category, repeating them 2/4/8... days
| until it "matures".
| kd5bjo wrote:
| > I didn't hear of spaced repetition in school, but isn't
| flash cards essentially the same thing?
|
| The key part of spaced repetition is the exponential backoff
| for correctly-remembered items: An extended time between
| reviews appears to strengthen your memory much more than a
| short time, and an exponential schedule will let you add a
| constant number of items per day without the review load
| growing uncontrollably.
|
| If you want to do this with physical flash cards, you can use
| something like a Leitner box:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
| dceddia wrote:
| I've used flash cards with Anki in the past for memorizing the
| IPA symbols, Swedish words, and a few other things. It worked
| pretty well.
|
| What I've realized recently while learning Rust (no Anki
| involved) is that, for me at least, new information needs
| something to "cling on" to. I wonder if this Spacing Effect is
| another facet of the same idea.
|
| My process with Rust was to first read most of The Book [0], and
| after this I had a decent understanding and I _thought_ I'd be
| able to write some code. The I tried (and mostly fumbled) writing
| some code. But it turned out I couldn't remember much of the
| syntax, nor the finer details of how the borrowing system worked.
| Most of the stuff I'd read hadn't really stuck.
|
| After some time coding I went back and reread parts of The Book
| that I was fuzzy on, and those things came into clearer focus,
| and I was able to get further with the code.
|
| The cycle repeated itself a few times - first with basic syntax,
| then with how to specify generic types, then with various ways I
| tangled myself up with the borrow checker, then lifetimes, then
| how to write iterators. With each stage I needed the sum of my
| previous experience PLUS another visit to either The Book or
| Programming Rust or some other explanation. Reading it all up
| front wasn't good enough; ingesting the info needed to come at
| the right time.
|
| I've seen this a lot also with people learning to code
| (especially in the web dev world), where they'll watch a whole
| course and then lament that they still can't build anything on
| their own. I think it's the same core issue: too much
| information-up-front with nothing for it to stick to.
|
| 0: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
| colmvp wrote:
| Yeah my model of learning is like a game of ping pong where I
| go back and forth, reading some information, fumble with it,
| read it again, practice it again, etc. Until one day I wake up
| and realize the thing I found difficult to understand is now
| second nature.
|
| When I was a junior developer, I recall reading comments from
| other developers suggesting to extensively read docs before
| applying a library/language, but I find that reading without
| actively practicing results in lost knowledge because I don't
| really have anything for the knowledge to cling on to. It's
| akin to watering a field where you don't know where the seeds
| are.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think your mentioned examples fall clearly into two
| categories. Plain memorization and understanding.
|
| Spaced repetition (so in extension, anki) helps immensely with
| the former, but does very little for the latter. Eg. one could
| probably go through some advanced math anki deck, but would
| likely not get better in math at all.
|
| The second category (with math, as well as programming
| languages, but many hand crafty thing also) require practice
| and only that can help the process of learning here.
|
| Most study materials have aspects from both (medicine comes to
| mind, with immense amount of "trivia" plus the occasional
| logical correlations that one might argue are the most
| important), and I have been trying to write a program that
| could tackle this duality for years, but unfortunately it never
| got priority :/
| adolph wrote:
| > What I've realized recently while learning Rust (no Anki
| involved) is that, for me at least, new information needs
| something to "cling on" to. I wonder if this Spacing Effect is
| another facet of the same idea.
|
| I think the concept you are looking for is "schema."
|
| _In psychology and cognitive science, a schema (plural
| schemata or schemas) describes a pattern of thought or behavior
| that organizes categories of information and the relationships
| among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of
| preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the
| world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new
| information. Schemata influence attention and the absorption of
| new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit
| into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the
| schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a
| tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory
| information. Schemata can help in understanding the world and
| the rapidly changing environment. People can organize new
| perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not
| require complex thought when using schema, since automatic
| thought is all that is required._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)
|
| See also "Memory Palace" or "Method of loci."
|
| _It turns out the mental athletes were purposefully converting
| the information they were memorizing into images, and then
| placing these images into a mentally constructed "palace" --
| thus the involvement of visual memory and spatial navigation._
|
| https://fs.blog/the-memory-palace/
|
| Edit: I think schema is to spaced repetition what access is to
| storage. They are at their best when put together.
| malort wrote:
| The first versions of Anki (ca 2006) were based on spaced
| repetition algorithms developed for a piece of software called
| SuperMemo, which came out 21 years earlier in 1985 [0].
|
| Piotr Wozniak, the author of SuperMemo, writes a lot about
| spaced repetition and memory in general. What you're describing
| are basically items 1 and 2 of his "Twenty rules of formulating
| knowledge" [1]: "Do not learn if you don't understand," and
| "Learn before you memorize." It's an extremely useful article
| if you're a heavy Anki user.
|
| 0: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Algorithm:_30-year-
| lon...
|
| 1:
| https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...
| rkagerer wrote:
| I've found you have to _need_ the information for it to stick.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Guys, I need flashcards for AWS associated Dev certificate. What
| is the best solution?
| knubie wrote:
| For those interested, I've been working on an app that applies
| these principles for the past 3 years. [0] It uses markdown for
| formatting and a local-first architecture that works offline.
|
| [0] https://mochi.cards/
| clownpepe wrote:
| This looks awesome! Much easier to pick up than the anki-decks
| I tried to create. You doing this full-time? Want to invest my
| time and knowledge into decks, but hoping this wont get
| abandoned in 1-2 years :x
| knubie wrote:
| Thanks! Yes I am working on Mochi full time. I have plans to
| stop development, or sell the app. Plus I think there is at
| least some peace of mind in knowing that, since it is an
| offline-first architecture, you will always be able to use
| the app no matter what happens with development.
| NeedMoreTime4Me wrote:
| Incredibly well-designed application!
|
| Anki Import worked perfectly (except MathJax) and the there are
| many well thought out details. Thanks for the tip.
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(page generated 2022-01-23 23:01 UTC)