The Most Effective Learning Technique You Have Probably Never Used

Learning How to Learn Part 2

In part 1, I discussed why active learning is the only real way to learn something new. Most of us fall back to passively consuming information and convince ourselves that we understand something when we don’t. Only when we put in the time and effort to recall information from our brain, i.e. active learning, we 1. recognise what we do and do not understand and 2. Initiate the biological processes in our brain that enable learning.

In part 2, I want to focus on the next critical insight that enables top performers to learn quicker and retain knowledge for longer: Consistent practice. We all know this to be accurate; the longer and more consistently you do something, the better you remember it. People get good at math from practising 1000s of math problems over long periods; basketball players get good at scoring points by practising their free-throws thousands of times over years.

However, a lesser-known technique makes practice easier to do and far more effective. Spaced repetition learning.

Spacing Effect

When we first learn something, it is stored in short term memory. However, after some time we quickly forget this piece of information, you can see this effect in the graph above. Between day 0 and 1 after learning something, our memory retention steeply decreases.

However, if we relearn the same piece of information a day later notice how the steepness of the “forgetting curve” decreases. This effect continues for each subsequent learning session, the more we revise something, the more effectively it gets stored in our long term memory.

But here is the kicker, we do not need to revise every day if anything increasing the space between revision sessions leads to better learning because our brains need to work harder to remember something if we have not seen it for a long time. Through active learning, we know when our brains work harder, we learn better.

Spaced repetition Learning

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect.

This straightforward idea enables people to effectively remember vast amounts of information in a relatively short period. For my grade 12 exams, I memorised 1500 Zulu words and 2000 IT definitions in 1 month. However, this technique’s real benefit happens when you do this over more extended periods. Many medical students globally use this technique to remember 100 000+ terms throughout their degrees.

It has the added benefit of making study sessions much shorter and easier to commit to because the algorithm is only showing you cards you need to see for that day. Meaning on any given day, you would at the max need to revise 10–20 cards (depending on how much time you have to learn the whole deck). So if you start studying for an exam enough in advance, all you need to do is spend 10 minutes a day revising your cards, and you can be confident that you will ace the exam. Duolingo uses the same technique for learning languages.

The most powerful app out there that implements spaced repetition learning is Anki. It is a simple app that lets you add flashcards and adaptively creates a study schedule for the cards. I have used this app religiously since I first found it, and I do not understand why it is not more popular. Anki single handily got me through, my law and language courses in school and university.

If you would like to learn more about this technique and how to use Anki I would strongly recommend the following video:

Final remarks

There is a belief that this technique only works well for topics where there is a lot of information to memorise like languages, history, medicine or law. I mostly agree with this, but I do not see why the same principle cannot be applied to more logical topics like coding, math and physics. It is merely that existing software like Anki does not have the feature set to support math or physics questions.

Anki for math is a coding project sitting at the back of my mind for a while now. I am strongly considering building such a product if you think something like this would be useful to you or if you have had a similar idea let me know. I would love to discuss your thoughts on the topic.

This post is part of a 30-day writing challenge I am doing. Every day for 30 days, I am posting an article of at least 500 words. If you notice that I miss a day, I will buy you lunch.