[roflmyeggo]

As someone who has dabbled in both biology/chemistry and now computer science academically, my thoughts on flash cards and spaced repetition software has changed over the years.

On one side you have the biology/chemistry guys who tend to use a lot of flashcards, and have a reputation for "just memorizing" facts. Then on the other end you have the physics/computer science guys who often refer to themselves as "lazy" for lack of memorizing and have a reputation for only focusing on conceptual ideas.

It seems to me that the people who succeed utilize a mixture of both approaches ("memorization" and "conceptual understanding"). I'm not sure when these two approaches suddenly became mutually exclusive.

As an example, although there were some classes in Biology that required a heavy amount of memorization, without the flash cards it would have been very hard for me to make the conceptual connections during lectures, while reading, etc.

Knowledge and understanding is kind of like a spider web, the more you have, the more you are able to grasp.

Purely focusing on conceptualizing the topics at hand has never worked out as well as I had hoped.

[tfigment]

The only class I ever used flash cards was in Organic Chemistry. I do not think they helped long term memory at all as I recall next to nothing from that. If anything the act of creating the cards helped more than anything. I think this might be where the joining of the two sort of happens as you indicate.

To further that point, during exams some classes allowed 1 sheet of paper with anything you can put on it. I created some super dense cheat sheets in my time and I am fairly sure that I never referenced them but once or twice in 4 years of school. But again the active of creating them and sorting out important and unimportant information was key in solidifying knowledge for the long term. If someone handed me those cards or sheet they would have been useless to me in the long run is at least how I see it.

The other thing I learned in school was anything I crammed for I knew I was not going to learn. It may have been enough to get through the next couple of days but it was not going to stick. I took some summer school courses and found it to be a waste as it was too much like cramming as it was so condensed.

I guess I did well in school by using something like SRS which was allowing time between study sessions for information to settle and allow subsequent review after time. There is probably more than one reason for university courses to be on alternating days as it probably facilitates this kind of thinking. The only thing is that SRS seems to be focused on much shorter time periods than a day or 2.

[chucksmash]

What you say about the act of making the cards themselves rings true to me.

When I was preparing for the GRE in 2010 I first wrote down all the words and definitions from both the Princeton Review and Kaplan GRE vocab books on a legal pad. That didn't work as well as I'd hoped for quizzing (it's a pain to try not to read 90% of the page) so I wrote a really basic data entry script in Python that I used to input the words/defs and then a second one that would generate random questions based off of them (definition + 4 words as MC).

By the time I was done with typing them all in and debugging my little quiz script, I'd say I already had active recall on >90% of them. Having that working quizzing tool at the end to practice recognition was just icing on the cake - creating it in the first place was more useful to me.