The research supports what most of us 'know' from experience.
I am curious to know a few things, though:
a) LIke Linyi Wang asks, how does working with good-quality premade cards compare with using self-made cards.
b) Consider the times table, for example -- very basic facts, one fact to a card. I don't think it would make much of a difference whether one is using premade cards or self-made cards, except when one is adding mnemonic hints or other very personal cues.
But let's say we are trying to digest/internalize a book on, say, cognitive biases. More complex connections and relations to master here. Let us suppose a teacher has prepared good-quality cards for his/her students. I believe that however good those cards might be, it would be better for a student to create his/her own.
So the questions are: Should a learner creating her/his own flashcards use them only for facts and very basic connections? Or, pick important passages dealing with the connections and summarizations and create Cloze cards? Or use the Cloze passages initially to master the connections, then work only on remembering the facts?
Good point; I agree. Creating your own cards would likely be more useful in situations where there is an opportunity to make meaningful mental connections. In the Pan et al (2023) experiments, the researchers had the participants read two educational text passages on the topics of "expressionist art" and "Ancient Rome". Each passage was about 500 words long. A participant would spend 20–25 min using premade flashcards or creating and then using the user-generated flashcards to practice key terms and concepts from the passage. I can appreciate why the exercise of creating-and-practicing flashcards for this kind of activity would be advantageous. Creating your own flashcards would give you a chance to create semantic connections between a term and its meaning. In comparison, the act of building flashcards to learn your multiplication facts would likely not help as much, since there is not a lot of opportunity for meaning-making... memorizing math facts is more of a rote-learning activity.
Thank you, Sir, for writing back -- and in detail too.
I think making the right kind of cards is a fuzzy art: within broad guidelines, one has to find what works best, and each new set one makes, for a new topic/subject, the same artfulness is called for.
It makes sense that making one's own flashcards can enhance learning since the brain works harder to make sense of the learning material during this process.
A further study may be valuable to compare spending the same amount of time making students' own flashcards and using good-quality pre-made flashcards before a delayed test. Such a study mimics real-life situations in which students have limited time and energy to study and inevitable distractions from other activities before their tests. Are there any published articles for studies conducted this way?
I am not sure if I understand the question correctly - can you clarify please and we will try and answer? I will share though that this study rules out the hypothesis that the extra time available for study and practice with premade flashcards guarantees better learning. A user-generated advantage was repeatedly observed despite deficits in study time, practice time, and number of repetitions per flashcard. User-generated advantages included extra exposure to materials and deep processing that occurs during content generation - sure it varied on what method learners used to create their flash cards.
It makes perfect sense that processing learning materials and making one's own flashcards can help with long-term knowledge retention.
However, since making one's flashcards takes time and effort, this approach has a cost: time. The example in the article only asked students to spend 20-25 minutes on flashcards, and the test was delayed by 48 hours, and it did not specify how long it took for the students to make their flashcards, nor did it mention the rounds of retrieval practice students did during the 20-25 minutes.
What if the studying time becomes longer, say, an hour a day, and the test is delayed by three months, and students can either:
1) spend the whole hour every day making a set of high-quality flashcards, going through the learning material only once and having no time for review, or
2) spend the whole hour doing four rounds of retrieval practice.
In this case, would choice 1 still be the more effective one for learning?
Hi Linyi! Thanks for your clarification. As I understand it, the 20 minutes described in the study included the time it took to create flashcards. So Group A spent the entire 20 minutes simply studying the flashcards. And Group B spent the 20 minutes creating the flashcards and studying. This means Group B spent less time actually using the flashcards, but on the other hand, they had the advantage of building them from scratch. The article says the following for the Group B participants: "The overall amount of time was constant in both conditions, so the time allotted for practicing <for Group B> was 20 min minus the time spent making the flashcards." All of the flashcards were computer-based, and it was designed in such a way that it was relatively quick and easy to add new flashcards. So I don't think Group B lost a lot of time.
The test results are generally not surprising. They could result from cognitive or psychological effects or both. (Or are psychological effects also considered cognitive?)
One way to look at learning may be "encoding" information and "storing" it in our long-term memory. Since positive emotions are more appealing, it is possible that learners can absorb information presented in positive ways more easily.
That said, it is also possible that, in some cases, negative emotions can reinforce learning as well. (Which type of experience stays longer in our minds, happiness or pain?) On the one hand, the brain might want to associate stimuli that lead to happiness, resulting in better information retention due to the influence of dopamine. On the other hand, the brain also quickly works out ways to avoid pain after experiencing unpleasant events.
It is possible that with proper design, a combination of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment can create a potent cocktail for learning. However, it is in the realm of psychology, and I need more education in this field.
Linyi, I had a very similar reaction to you with regard to this paper. Like you, I didn't find the results particularly surprising. However, I wanted to better understand WHY the speaker with the positive emotional tone was more memorable. The explanation offered by the Lawson et al (2021) paper is that "the learner feels a stronger social connection with the positive instructor than the negative instructor." I am not completely happy with that. It feels like only half an explanation. I suppose, to some extent, people prefer to be around positive people. If a speaker is happy and excited, perhaps it make the audience happy and excited too. Maybe emotions are a kind of social contagion. People LIKE to be around happy people. It's also possible that positive people are more animated when they talk, which would make the subject-matter more memorable. Anyway -- like you, I'm still puzzling this out!
Those are very interesting thoughts Linyi. Not being so good with the field of neuroscience (still exploring), I can't be sure if negative emotions do reinforce learning as well. What they did learn in this study was that students paid less attention to the instructor displaying negative emotions even though they performed the same on an immediately taken recall test. However, the delayed test showed better results in favour of positive instructor.
I am sure this is going to be studied further, we are just starting to uncover some fascinating things here. Until then, let's keep smiling as educators :)
I have always kept a happy face and a positive tone in front of my students, and the results are in our favor.
That said, I am also curious about the less pleasant approaches since they have been in the military for a long time, and the military cannot afford to have ineffective ways of training since it is a matter of life and death.
If there is any study showing the effectiveness of these approaches, I am willing to confirm the efficacy in self-experiments. For instance, if I make a mistake that I have always made in table tennis in the last two years, I can punish myself by taking an ice-cold shower. If I can correct this stubborn mistake within a month, I can say that punishment improves learning effectiveness indeed.
Right but punishment is different than a teacher displaying negative emotions. Punishments are very personal experiences and sure can lead to significant behavioral changes. I am sure there must be some experiments out there though I also doubt that there might be ethical concerns in conducting such studies involving punishing learners. I will do some digging, if you find something, do share.
Yes, punishments must be used with extreme caution (if used at all). In retrospect, I have co-designed the punishment element with my students in my in-person IELTS classes: after a mock test, each student must do ten pushups for every question they answered wrong, and I, as the instructor, must do 100 pushups or the total number of pushups of all students, whichever is less. Students thought it was an unpleasant yet fun activity, so their feedback was positive. However, I did not have a way to assess how much this activity helped their learning. It could be the punishment that worked, or it could be the short break and physical exercise that worked, or it may not have worked at all, but students improved their skills in other parts of the course.
The lack of experiment design training limited my ability to assess this approach.
Re: Making one's own flashcards
The research supports what most of us 'know' from experience.
I am curious to know a few things, though:
a) LIke Linyi Wang asks, how does working with good-quality premade cards compare with using self-made cards.
b) Consider the times table, for example -- very basic facts, one fact to a card. I don't think it would make much of a difference whether one is using premade cards or self-made cards, except when one is adding mnemonic hints or other very personal cues.
But let's say we are trying to digest/internalize a book on, say, cognitive biases. More complex connections and relations to master here. Let us suppose a teacher has prepared good-quality cards for his/her students. I believe that however good those cards might be, it would be better for a student to create his/her own.
So the questions are: Should a learner creating her/his own flashcards use them only for facts and very basic connections? Or, pick important passages dealing with the connections and summarizations and create Cloze cards? Or use the Cloze passages initially to master the connections, then work only on remembering the facts?
Good point; I agree. Creating your own cards would likely be more useful in situations where there is an opportunity to make meaningful mental connections. In the Pan et al (2023) experiments, the researchers had the participants read two educational text passages on the topics of "expressionist art" and "Ancient Rome". Each passage was about 500 words long. A participant would spend 20–25 min using premade flashcards or creating and then using the user-generated flashcards to practice key terms and concepts from the passage. I can appreciate why the exercise of creating-and-practicing flashcards for this kind of activity would be advantageous. Creating your own flashcards would give you a chance to create semantic connections between a term and its meaning. In comparison, the act of building flashcards to learn your multiplication facts would likely not help as much, since there is not a lot of opportunity for meaning-making... memorizing math facts is more of a rote-learning activity.
Thank you, Sir, for writing back -- and in detail too.
I think making the right kind of cards is a fuzzy art: within broad guidelines, one has to find what works best, and each new set one makes, for a new topic/subject, the same artfulness is called for.
It makes sense that making one's own flashcards can enhance learning since the brain works harder to make sense of the learning material during this process.
A further study may be valuable to compare spending the same amount of time making students' own flashcards and using good-quality pre-made flashcards before a delayed test. Such a study mimics real-life situations in which students have limited time and energy to study and inevitable distractions from other activities before their tests. Are there any published articles for studies conducted this way?
Hey Linyi,
I am not sure if I understand the question correctly - can you clarify please and we will try and answer? I will share though that this study rules out the hypothesis that the extra time available for study and practice with premade flashcards guarantees better learning. A user-generated advantage was repeatedly observed despite deficits in study time, practice time, and number of repetitions per flashcard. User-generated advantages included extra exposure to materials and deep processing that occurs during content generation - sure it varied on what method learners used to create their flash cards.
Hi Nidhi,
It makes perfect sense that processing learning materials and making one's own flashcards can help with long-term knowledge retention.
However, since making one's flashcards takes time and effort, this approach has a cost: time. The example in the article only asked students to spend 20-25 minutes on flashcards, and the test was delayed by 48 hours, and it did not specify how long it took for the students to make their flashcards, nor did it mention the rounds of retrieval practice students did during the 20-25 minutes.
What if the studying time becomes longer, say, an hour a day, and the test is delayed by three months, and students can either:
1) spend the whole hour every day making a set of high-quality flashcards, going through the learning material only once and having no time for review, or
2) spend the whole hour doing four rounds of retrieval practice.
In this case, would choice 1 still be the more effective one for learning?
Hi Linyi! Thanks for your clarification. As I understand it, the 20 minutes described in the study included the time it took to create flashcards. So Group A spent the entire 20 minutes simply studying the flashcards. And Group B spent the 20 minutes creating the flashcards and studying. This means Group B spent less time actually using the flashcards, but on the other hand, they had the advantage of building them from scratch. The article says the following for the Group B participants: "The overall amount of time was constant in both conditions, so the time allotted for practicing <for Group B> was 20 min minus the time spent making the flashcards." All of the flashcards were computer-based, and it was designed in such a way that it was relatively quick and easy to add new flashcards. So I don't think Group B lost a lot of time.
The test results are generally not surprising. They could result from cognitive or psychological effects or both. (Or are psychological effects also considered cognitive?)
One way to look at learning may be "encoding" information and "storing" it in our long-term memory. Since positive emotions are more appealing, it is possible that learners can absorb information presented in positive ways more easily.
That said, it is also possible that, in some cases, negative emotions can reinforce learning as well. (Which type of experience stays longer in our minds, happiness or pain?) On the one hand, the brain might want to associate stimuli that lead to happiness, resulting in better information retention due to the influence of dopamine. On the other hand, the brain also quickly works out ways to avoid pain after experiencing unpleasant events.
It is possible that with proper design, a combination of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment can create a potent cocktail for learning. However, it is in the realm of psychology, and I need more education in this field.
Linyi, I had a very similar reaction to you with regard to this paper. Like you, I didn't find the results particularly surprising. However, I wanted to better understand WHY the speaker with the positive emotional tone was more memorable. The explanation offered by the Lawson et al (2021) paper is that "the learner feels a stronger social connection with the positive instructor than the negative instructor." I am not completely happy with that. It feels like only half an explanation. I suppose, to some extent, people prefer to be around positive people. If a speaker is happy and excited, perhaps it make the audience happy and excited too. Maybe emotions are a kind of social contagion. People LIKE to be around happy people. It's also possible that positive people are more animated when they talk, which would make the subject-matter more memorable. Anyway -- like you, I'm still puzzling this out!
Those are very interesting thoughts Linyi. Not being so good with the field of neuroscience (still exploring), I can't be sure if negative emotions do reinforce learning as well. What they did learn in this study was that students paid less attention to the instructor displaying negative emotions even though they performed the same on an immediately taken recall test. However, the delayed test showed better results in favour of positive instructor.
I am sure this is going to be studied further, we are just starting to uncover some fascinating things here. Until then, let's keep smiling as educators :)
Hi Nidhi,
I agree :D
I have always kept a happy face and a positive tone in front of my students, and the results are in our favor.
That said, I am also curious about the less pleasant approaches since they have been in the military for a long time, and the military cannot afford to have ineffective ways of training since it is a matter of life and death.
If there is any study showing the effectiveness of these approaches, I am willing to confirm the efficacy in self-experiments. For instance, if I make a mistake that I have always made in table tennis in the last two years, I can punish myself by taking an ice-cold shower. If I can correct this stubborn mistake within a month, I can say that punishment improves learning effectiveness indeed.
Right but punishment is different than a teacher displaying negative emotions. Punishments are very personal experiences and sure can lead to significant behavioral changes. I am sure there must be some experiments out there though I also doubt that there might be ethical concerns in conducting such studies involving punishing learners. I will do some digging, if you find something, do share.
Thanks for pointing this out, Nidhi.
Yes, punishments must be used with extreme caution (if used at all). In retrospect, I have co-designed the punishment element with my students in my in-person IELTS classes: after a mock test, each student must do ten pushups for every question they answered wrong, and I, as the instructor, must do 100 pushups or the total number of pushups of all students, whichever is less. Students thought it was an unpleasant yet fun activity, so their feedback was positive. However, I did not have a way to assess how much this activity helped their learning. It could be the punishment that worked, or it could be the short break and physical exercise that worked, or it may not have worked at all, but students improved their skills in other parts of the course.
The lack of experiment design training limited my ability to assess this approach.