Comment by alkonaut
3 days ago
> Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material.
The books are brought back (at a cost) because the kids have proven to learn better from books, or a mix of mediums. They haven't, and won't, use only physical or only digital material. They'll use a mix.
You need to measure long term remembrance of the material, not short-term learning. A 5% increase in the speed of children learning a fact for the first time doesn't matter if the fact has disappeared from all their brains 6 months later, but to accomplish the latter at scale, there's no substitute - you need some kind of spaced repetition system. Otherwise you may as well have not taught the fact at all, and let them spend the time having fun or getting some exercise instead.
Is your idea that 6 to 15 year olds are going to suddenly discover Anki cards on their own and start using them? How high is that %?
I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.
(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)
And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).
The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).
I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.
There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).
I don’t think education is purely about remembering facts.
For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.
>[O]ften we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
I've never found remembering the simplified explanation to be a hindrance to learning the more complicated explanation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have found times where forgetting the simple explanation before ever getting to the more complicated one meant it felt like I was learning the complicated one from scratch.
>[W]e want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
You can't learn any of that stuff without having the facts at hand first, however.
More importantly, "recall" is a much broader subject than it may sound at first: The ability to tackle novel mathematical theorems is based largely upon one's recall of prior proofs, which I have found to be just as valuable a target for spaced repetition approaches as any. But even if it turned out that wasn't the case, simply separating one's school day into an hour or two of "recall work" followed by 5-6 hours of "dynamic work" where we work with and elaborate upon facts that everyone in the class is statistically guaranteed to remember sounds like a much better use of one's time.
I have no idea what the actual science referenced here is on this but I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
>I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
Likewise, I'm sure that science is weaker than it first appears.
I can point you to dozens of studies showing spaced repetition is robust and effective, across a wide variety of domains.
>[S]paced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
In fact I only found out about spaced repetition near the end of high school, so no, I wouldn't call it "part of education since forever". In fact I consider the fact it isn't a topic we scream about from the hilltops and make it a known thing for students a great civilization-wide error. It seems closer to an open secret that was a lot less well known even just a decade ago.
It's also not "slightly" easier with a PDF, it's much easier. Individual cards that would take much longer to create by hand (image occlusions in particular) take less than a minute with software. There is a reason I insist upon using ebooks these days, paper books just can't compete with that kind of efficiency.
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