[admiral33]

I've made plenty of flashcards during undergrad and creation can definitely be both high effort and low effort. Low effort copy and paste from textbook, high effort when using a plugin for anki can mean obfuscating multiple parts of an algorithm/tree. I'm proud of my best flashcards - but is there any evidence that creation + studying is more effective than studying alone over the same timeframe? Anki suggests that on their site but I haven't seen much evidence for it.

Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?

[BeetleB]

I'm not sure I understand what "study -> study" is. Is it studying without creating flash cards, or utilizing them? As in just studying the book, doing problems, etc?

If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).

[admiral33]

Yeah my comment wasn't clear. Creating the flashcards is a slow process but supposedly imparts 'deeper' knowledge for the creator. That is the claim I'm curious about. Anki has shared decks that anyone can download and study [1]. Say someone has an exam coming up that they need to prepare for. They have two choices: study flashcards given to them, or make and study their own flashcards. For the sake of this example the deck that would be given to them and the one they'd make are identical and contain sufficient information to achieve a perfect score. 3 hypothetical scenarios:

- A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away.

- A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them.

- A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence.

Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive.

1: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/