
Spaced repetition and practice - oskarth
http://experiments.oskarth.com/srspractice/
======
curiousDog
Gwern has a nice article on Spaced repetition:
[https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

~~~
melling
Here's a HN discussion about that site:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539390)

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ZeroGravitas
Kind of a tangent but...

Anyone know of a nerdy source for stretching exercises? I'd love to know
exactly how often, and how far to stretch to maximise progress rather than
just guess but I've not really found anything that seems to have rigorous
justification for their numbers.

~~~
askafriend
I gotchu you.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/jjprs/starting_str...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/jjprs/starting_stretching_a_flexibility_program_for/)

The Reddit user phrakture is awesome and absolutely knows what he's talking
about. He contributed quality content very often to the /r/fitness subreddit.
Check out those programs he crafted to get more flexible!

Starting Stretching: [http://phraktured.net/starting-
stretching.html](http://phraktured.net/starting-stretching.html)

Molding Mobility: [http://phraktured.net/molding-
mobility.html](http://phraktured.net/molding-mobility.html)

~~~
rhizome
Antranik (/u/antranik) is good, too.

[http://antranik.org/bodyweight-training/](http://antranik.org/bodyweight-
training/)

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codingWithGit
Spaced repetition is more for remembering things. I've had good experience
with it. However, I don't think the methods used in this article are valid to
test spaced repetition. The test the author used are solving problems. Solving
a problem require much more than recalling facts. Just because you remember
something doesn't mean you understand it. In my opinion this is a very flawed
experiment.

~~~
rm445
There must be an in-between case where a small problem is solved by
remembering the method. The kind of thing where you end up looking up the
double-angle formulae or checking the definition for integration by parts. I
guess the programming equivalent is remembering how to insert into a tree or
do a bubble sort.

Problem-solving in the general case encompasses all of human creativity: I
wouldn't claim that one becomes capable of tackling difficult problems through
memorising techniques. But once you're part-way to solving a problem there is
often a sequence of simpler steps (analysis, not synthesis) - surely most of
us would like to be faster/more efficient/make fewer errors in these steps.

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wallflower
While this particular article was about SRS for learning programming ( _note:
very interesting_ \- may experiment applying this to teaching kids/young
adults coding - possibly with a "limited, variable sugar reward system"), SRS
can be applied to language learning, In fact, in language learning, it can be
a fancy way of avoiding saying 'rote memorization'. The hard part for most
people of language learning is 'rote memorization' (e.g. knowing conjugations
cold, without thinking).

For those of you who are interested in language learning, I'd like to redirect
you to tokenadult's very long and comprehensive post from 2.6 years ago.

"Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was
the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at
university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter
and translator..."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816)

Brief aside on non-Anki SRS. Memrise is a SRS for language learning that I
gave up on because it took 3-4x longer to demonstrate that I 'knew' a word
because of the variations on testing (cloze, completion, multiple choice
(guess). Also, no fault of Memrise - but the problem of SRS is that a) the
decks cannot be reversed - e.g. French to English cannot easily be made
English to French and b) eventually you just start spitting out entire phrases
rather than individual words. Context is everything. Language can be subtle.
We may forget the subtleties in our native language(s).

~~~
rtpg
As for deck reversal... I have an Anki deck, where the default template
actually generates multiple cards (I put in Kanji/Reading/English Definition,
and it spits out 3 cards, with front being Kanji, Reading, English
respectively).

You can do this in Anki by clicking on "Cards..." on the add dialog in Anki
and then creating multiple cards.

This lets me concentrate on the parts of the word retention that I cannot hold
onto. Sometimes it's recalling from reading, sometimes recalling from English.
Mainly depends on how I initially encountered the word/ how familiar I am with
the radicals. But it avoids reworking the things I _do_ get.

~~~
wallflower
Thanks, I've been hiding from Anki! That is a clever idea that I will play
with.

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masteranza
That's a good piece of advice, although it always bothered me to create
flashcards. I create cloze flashcards from notebooks of my knowledge:
[https://github.com/masteranza/MathematicaAnki](https://github.com/masteranza/MathematicaAnki)

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hentrep
Is anyone aware of a spaced repetition app for iOS that allows you to enter
content via a web interface? Most of the flash card apps I've seen require you
to build out cards from within the app, which is tedious and clumsy.

~~~
sbmassey
Anki allows you to add cards through the Ankiweb interface, in addition to
having a more flexible card/note data model than most of the alternatives.

The iOS Anki interface _is_ pretty expensive at $25, but you can do everything
through the web if you want, albeit clumsily.

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closed
Great article! Just a note: spaced repetition is not only for rote learning,
or "remembering things".

When talking about spaced repetition, we need to make a distinction between
repeated studying (seeing both the problem and answer) and testing. Once
you've overlearned the material, the biggest value of an SRS comes from
testing yourself, even if you don't see the solution after [1]. Another
potential benefit is interleaving concepts from different problems [2].

Another distinction is what is being tested. For example, testing using same
math problem you learned from is repeating both the concept learned and exact
content of the problem. Repeating the exact content you originally studied may
dilute the benefit of testing you on the concept. However, it is clear that
repeated testing on the concept is very beneficial when the content is new
(e.g. spaced testing related math problems, [3]). That isn't to say repeating
the concept and content can't be beneficial, I think it can be useful, but I'm
less sure about how it stacks up.

In the posted article, I think the type of SR will be useful because (1)
recalling the pieces being tested are helpful when solving the problem (or a
related one), and (2) hopefully they cue you to think of the problems domain
they're related to. In a sense, interleaving the pieces can be a test of
matching the piece with it's problem domain.

It seems like a better solution would be to create related problems related to
the ones you learned initially, to test yourself in a spaced way. For example,
you and a friend could solve the same Eloquent Javascript problems, and then
create a handful of new problems that are in the same problem domain. Then,
you could trade problems for spaced testing. This type of spaced testing could
be thought of as repeating problem domain, but not exact problem content. To
the degree that the SRS interleaves testing problem domains, it will likely be
especially effective for solving new problems [2].

[1]:
[http://pss.sagepub.com/content/27/2/223.full.pdf+html](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/27/2/223.full.pdf+html)

(based on this classic!:
[http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2008_Karpicke_...](http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/2008_Karpicke_Roediger_Science.pdf))

[2]:
[http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/papers/carvalho_goldstone_delaye...](http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/papers/carvalho_goldstone_delayedgeneralization2014.pdf)

[3]:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1266/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1266/abstract)

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hacker_9
_" A spaced repetition system (SRS) is a way of efficiently repeating things
you don’t want to forget, usually by using electronic flashcards. A SRS
exploits the fact that if you remember something well you don’t have to repeat
it as often."_

It's interesting that the technique simply shoves the same information in your
face until you no longer forget it, instead of actually trying to exploit
known ways of learning quickly, such as via the Method of Loci.

~~~
Houshalter
They aren't mutually exclusive.

