{"id":7456,"date":"2024-02-11T08:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-02-11T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=7456"},"modified":"2024-02-03T08:41:21","modified_gmt":"2024-02-03T13:41:21","slug":"should-students-make-their-own-flashcards-take-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/should-students-make-their-own-flashcards-take-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Students Make Their Own Flashcards, Take II"},"content":{"rendered":"

A respected colleague recently posted a study about making flashcards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The basic question: should students make their own flashcards<\/em>, or use premade flashcards<\/em>?<\/p>\n

In my experience, people really like the answer “students should make their own.” This\u00a0approach feels more active\/good, compared with the passive\/bad strategy of using someone else’s.<\/p>\n

I have had two concerns with this popular answer.<\/p>\n

First:<\/strong> how will students know what flashcards to make? Because students don’t know what they don’t know, they probaby don’t know what they should be studying with flashcards.<\/p>\n

Second:<\/strong> making flashcards takes time. If students have only 30 minutes to study, and spend 5-10 of those minutes making cards, then\u00a0they have much less time to review.<\/p>\n

And,\u00a0as I wrote back in March of 2023<\/a>, the most on-point study I could find confirmed those suspicions. Students who made their own flashcards did not learn more — <\/em>although they DID spend more time.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you can learn the same amount in less time, why not do that?<\/p>\n

For all these reasons, I was surprised to read the title of the study my friend recommended:<\/p>\n

“User-Generated Digital Flashcards Yield Better Learning Than Premade Flashcards”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s going on? Have I been giving you bad advice?<\/p>\n

A Feature, Not a Bug<\/h2>\n

Before I explore this new study — led by Dr. Steven Pan — I want to focus on the seemingly vexing problem of conflicting studies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That is: Lin & McDaniels’ study from 2018 says “making your own flashcards DOESN’T help you learn.” Pan’s study from 2024 says “making your own flaschcards DOES help you learn.”<\/p>\n

What’s going on here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started coming to Learning and the Brain because I wanted\u00a0research-based answers to my teaching questions<\/em>. (Perhaps you started coming for the same reason.)<\/p>\n

The process, I thought, would go like this:<\/p>\n

I have a question.<\/p>\n

Researchers tell me the correct answer.<\/p>\n

I do what the researchers tells me.<\/p>\n

So simple.<\/p>\n

Here’s the problem. Psychology is complicated.<\/em>\u00a0People are COMPLICATED.\u00a0<\/em>Teaching and learning are\u00a0COMPLICATED<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

When we start using psychology research methods to study people who are teaching and learning, we’re studying fantastically complicated systems.\"Teenage<\/a><\/p>\n

OF COURSE we get contradictory answers to specific questions.<\/p>\n

This result doesn’t mean something is wrong or broken. It means that we’ve done enough research to unearth the genuine complexity of the questions we’re exploring: psychology + people + teaching + learning.<\/p>\n

The fact that we’ve found contradictory results\u00a0means that we’re doing this right<\/em>. In other words: if all the research I find tells me the same thing, I probably haven’t looked at enough research.<\/p>\n

So: if contradictory findings are the norm, what do we actually do in our classrooms?<\/p>\n

Well: we start by looking at the specifics of the research…<\/p>\n

Specifics of the Research<\/h2>\n

I’ve got two different studies with contrasting headlines.\u00a0To resolve the differences, let’s get specific.<\/p>\n

First, Pan’s research team\u00a0executed all the steps we want them to.<\/p>\n

They’ve got precise hypotheses and control groups and\u00a0abstruse calculations and colorful graphs. The conflict between Lin (2018) and Pan (2024), in other words, doesn’t result from unprofessional work.<\/p>\n

Over the course of their six studies, Pan’s team found that students remembered more when they\u00a0came up with their own definitions of words<\/em> than they did when they\u00a0used flashcards with pre-written defintions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Likewise, students remembered more when they\u00a0wrote\u00a0their own examples on flashcards<\/em> than when they used pre-written examples<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And so forth.<\/p>\n

So: YES, students spent more time<\/em> making their own cards. But because they\u00a0thought harder while they did so<\/em>, they ultimately remembered and applied the concepts better 2 days later.<\/p>\n

How then can we explain the difference between the two studies?<\/p>\n

Focus, Focus, Focus<\/h2>\n

Because these two studies are different, we can — of course! — find lots of differences.<\/p>\n

Here’s a key difference in my view:<\/p>\n

In the (2024) Pan study, the researchers\u00a0told the students which words to study<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the (2018) Lin and McDaniel study, they didn’t.<\/p>\n

So, students learn more useful stuff\u00a0when we tell them what stuff is useful —<\/em>\u00a0that’s the recent Pan study.<\/p>\n

They don’t learn more useful stuff\u00a0when they decide on their own what’s useful<\/em> — that’s the older Lin & McDaniel study.<\/p>\n

My own hypothesis, thus, goes like this:<\/p>\n

Students will probably learn more from substantive flashcards that they generate (paraphrase, examples, etc.) than from pre-written flashcards … as long as they get good guidance about the terms and concepts that merit flashcards<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the absence of that guidance, they probably won’t learn more — because the pre-written flashcards will focus on more useful words and concepts.<\/p>\n

Now, my hypothesis hasn’t been tested directly, as far as I know. But it both makes sense and explains the differences between these sets of studies.<\/p>\n

TL;DR<\/h2>\n

Should students make their own flashcards?<\/p>\n

As long as<\/p>\n

First:<\/strong> they generate new information (rather than simply copying it down), and<\/p>\n

Second:<\/strong> we tell them which words and concepts merit flashcards,<\/p>\n

then, probably yes.<\/p>\n

Given the complexity of this research field, however, we should probably keep our eyes out for further research.<\/p>\n

\n

Pan, S. C., Zung, I., Imundo, M. N., Zhang, X., & Qiu, Y. (2022). User-generated digital flashcards yield better learning than premade flashcards.\u00a0Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A respected colleague recently posted a study about making flashcards. The basic question: should students make their own flashcards, or use premade flashcards? In my experience, people really like the answer “students should make their own.” This\u00a0approach feels more active\/good, compared with the passive\/bad strategy of using someone else’s. I have had two concerns with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[204],"class_list":["post-7456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-flashcards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7456"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7465,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456\/revisions\/7465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}