[cicatriz]

I've been thinking about this for a while--I created a spaced repetition system to digitize and learn material in college (alas, I don't use it anymore). I have a philosophical approach to the question here (also cited in Gwern's article): http://blog.learnstream.org/2012/08/spaced-repetition-in-nat...

Your distinction between learning facts and learning ways of thinking is interesting. Most of the spaced repetition research and design is around fact recall--what's called "paired associates" because you recall some response paired with some stimulus. I don't have any evidence for it, but I'd say that the schema can be lost just as well as facts can be.

One thing I will say is that spaced repetition is generally known for the repetition--that you retain something over time, and the spacing is more thought of as convenience. But the truth is that spacing is also part of better learning--when recall is difficult it's learned better (called "desirable difficulties"). I thought of that because Robert Bjork does that research with skills as well as facts. (See http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learni... for an overview.)

[zxcvvcxz]

Yes it's not obvious to me how to impart knowledge in a SRS format that's more than fact recall. I was thinking of starting with thermodynamics because it's one of the more straight-forward equation courses - but then how do you properly do problem solving? I suppose if you walk through a problem broken up into enough chunks phrased as questions, and somehow give users a toolbox from which to choose equations from, it might work.

[cicatriz]

Not sure how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go, but here's what I know:

The field of intelligent tutoring systems is essentially how to break up a problem and estimate your knowledge on each piece (called a "knowledge component"), and then how to instruct based on the resulting student model. I got started by reading about Andes physics tutor: http://oli.cmu.edu/wp-oli/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/VanLehn... but there are many examples.

Most of the research doesn't actually incorporate spaced repetition. One exception is Philip Pavlik's work: http://optimallearning.org/

It's still a lot of effort to break things down into knowledge components and figure out the sequencing and instruction. That's why companies like Carnegie Learning and Knewton exist, and even those are only targeting elementary or intro level material for now.