After ten years in the show, there’s one topic I have never explored sufficiently in my classes: what’s the most effective way to study and retain what we learn? I think the failure to discuss this topic with students is probably true for most of us in secondary education. No matter the subject, the pattern is similar: introduce and lecture about concepts, ask the students to apply the content, then assess knowledge. Students devote some amount of time studying and devoting the concepts to their memory as best they can. Why haven’t I spent more time explaining to students the best way to learn? Part of reason is apathy. After all, you don’t need to cram facts in order to do well on a rhetorical analysis essay, which takes a more holistic assessment of skills. But, then again, I do teach plenty of content that requires memory retention (comma rules, important authors, grammatical function). So what’s my problem?
The real reason has been ignorance. I wasn’t sure what was the best way to retain a large amount of information. That’s changed recently, though. A few months ago I started brushing up on my Spanish. I had forgotten the majority of the vocabulary and grammar rules I learned in college, and for all intents and purposes, I starting from the beginning. I picked up a copy of Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever, a valuable read in that it exposed me to an incredibly useful tool for permanently retaining large amounts of information: Anki.
In college I studied Spanish with flashcards. By the time I graduated, an entire desk drawer was packed with decks and decks of Spanish vocabulary. They were the rough building blocks to my brute-force study method: look at the word on the front, try to know the answer on the back. Difficult cards were saved for future, intermittent study sessions. Everyone else I knew had a similar method. It’s time-consuming, ungainly to transport, and not conducive for long-term retention. Who has time to organize so many cards, let alone review them consistently?
Anki has taken the flash-card method and given it a peer-reviewed jolt of efficiency. Developed in 2006, it’s a software program that allows the user to create decks of digital flashcards. But this isn’t another form of Quizlet. Anki uses spaced repetition to make the most efficient use of your time. Spaced repetition controls when the user will review the card again, based on how well the user knows the content. For example…
First I think about whether I know the answer. Then I click the show answer button.
If I was wrong, I choose the button on the far left, which will review the card again this study session. If I was right, then I choose one of the options to push the card for a review in the future. You can adjust the scale of these features to your preference, but the default setting is to review in four days in the future, then a week, then a month, and so forth, in increasingly large time intervals. If you get it wrong at any of those checkpoints, the card is pushed back to one day, and the process starts again. Thanks to the principles of brain plasticity and memory-retrieval, as the card is correctly answered and pushed to greater distance in the future, the information has been committed to your long term memory and can be easily retrieved. Study sessions vary based on the amount of cards that you input (there are entire decks that can be downloaded online, but it is heavily encouraged that you create your own, as it increases the level of engagement and, by extension, retention). In my free time each day I input an average of twenty or so cards as I study and read Spanish. As of this writing, I have almost 2000 flashcards of Spanish vocabulary and grammar concepts, and on average I spend 23 minutes per day reviewing an average of 143 cards. Anki, by the way, offers you personal progress data, lots and lots of glorious personal progress data.
Over the past decade, Anki has become extremely popular in fields that require the retention of huge amounts of information, such as medicine, law, and language learning. So why isn’t it more popular in high school? It isn’t the price. Anki is free on all platforms except iOS, where it is a reasonable $25. When I asked around, some students were familiar with the program, but only in passing. From my observation, though, the most popular form of studying in high school is still late-night, last-minute cramming. While that may get the job done in the short-term, cramming has few long-term benefits in knowledge retention, and also robs students of valuable sleep time, which carries its own risks in poor physical and mental health. And for the most part, students know and accept that. The decision to cram is a prioritization of a dozen other life factors.
That’s what presents the biggest hangup with Anki’s use by high school students: for it to be effective, you have to use it every day. You have to have the discipline to show up every day, either on your computer or the mobile app, and complete your flashcard reviews, otherwise the benefits of spaced repetition won’t be effective. Compared with cramming, the instant benefits are much less immediate. It’s the ultimate long game. A student could start using Anki at the beginning of AP US History and over the course of the school year, assuming the student is consistently inputting notes, be fully prepared to crush the exam in May, and then move forward in his/her life with a comprehensive understanding of our country. But Anki is not meant for a rush study session to prepare for Thursday’s quiz on chapter four. For that, there’s the effective (but ephemeral) Quizlet, or paper flash cards. For high schoolers — again, this is just from my observation — the long-term enrichment of their course’s content runs a very distant second to the more immediate: get a good grade. If that can be done with bursts of cramming, why wouldn’t they choose that route? That may point to a larger question about the priorities of our education system.
Despite all this, I do believe there is a large population of students who would take advantage of Anki and have the discipline to use it effectively. I think the only reason these students aren’t using it in high school is purely from ignorance. This fall, I plan on encouraging its use with all my students this year, because — to go full evangelist here — it truly is possible for all students to make use of it. Every single student at Champe has thirty minutes in their day that could be borrowed from time normally spent texting, watching Netflix, Tik Toking, or Instagramming.
And Anki doesn’t have to be used for school or language. Some use it to learn trivia, such as famous paintings, dates, and capitals of countries. While most of my flashcards are Spanish, I have a deck devoted to notable numbers, such as the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) and the amount of square feet in an acre (43,560), both of which I now know by heart, not to brag.
Why devote time to learn this? Well…why not? Would the half hour I set aside for Anki in the evening be more productively spent using social media or watching TV? Is there not enough evidence that speaks to the health benefits of challenging the brain? Is knowledge not power????
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On Thursday, I will reach one hundred straight days of Anki, helpfully tracked by an add-on that provides a level of game-ification to the experience (kinda like SnapChat streaks, kids!!).
To be clear, it’s not a magic learning hack that makes you remember everything overnight; it’s simply a very helpful tool in the journey of self-improvement, a journey we should all take part in whether we are students or adults. Anki has been indispensable in my Spanish crash course, which in turn has offered me a productive use of my time at home this summer. As we begin the fall semester in a few weeks, I look forward to continuing using Anki and spreading its gospel to my students.