Why flashcards fail

For decades, spaced repetition flashcards have been popular amongst learners for combating the problem of forgetting. By calculating the ideal time for reviewing flashcards, it’s possible to predictably improve how well you remember the knowledge that you review.

Often, the surprising effectiveness of this approach causes learners to quickly make it their primary tool for learning. However, flashcards are not a panacea, and so this approach results in two types of problems over time.

One class of problems is caused by misuse - particularly overuse - of flashcards, while the other class involves problems in learning that flashcards simply can't solve. This second class is relevant because it shows the need for more tools beyond just flashcards.

Problems caused by misuse of flashcards

There are a range of problems in the way that people use flashcards, which undermines their effectiveness. They include:

Using flashcards as a substitute for understanding

Rather than taking time to make sense of new information, learners may cram hundreds or thousands of keywords and phrases. However, since flashcards only lock in the current level of understanding, this approach results in a long term retention of a shallow level of understanding.

Memorising the wrong things

While spaced repetition flashcards take care of the process of strengthening memory, the content is entirely the responsibility of the learner. The choice of this content, from overall topics all the way down to the specific wording of an individual flashcard, is paramount to success.

Many people use flashcards to memorise details that they find hard to recall. Unfortunately, the stuff that is harder to recall is inherently less well-connected and less understood; in other words, it provides less value, which is why our brain tries to dump it! Using flashcards to prevent that type of forgetting is often equivalent to hoarding trash.

Losing the big picture

A common complaint from users of spaced repetition flashcards is that while they can remember all the little details, they lose the big picture of how all those details fit together. This problem is usually a consequence of the first two problems: If you don’t invest enough effort into really understanding the core ideas before you memorise them, or if you make flashcards out of hard-to-remember facts and details instead of the big, meaningful ideas, you will naturally discover that your knowledge has become a set of disjointed facts.

Quantity over quality

When a learner is unaware of how to make higher quality flashcards, most of their effort gets spent in making and cramming a lot of them. The consequence is an accumulation of junk.  

Initially however, they don’t seem like junk. They feel valuable because they contain all sorts of words and phrases that the person wasn’t able to recall before. But after a few years (after all, spaced repetition is about long term knowledge) when it becomes clear that such flashcards don’t represent any real understanding, a sense of disillusionment can kick in. Even if that doesn’t happen, the reality is that precious time is wasted practising useless flashcards instead of actually learning.

Problems that flashcards cannot solve

When flashcards are your only tool in learning, you will still find your progress slowed considerably by the following problems:

Information overload

The fundamental problem of learning in modern times is information overload. Forgetting is just a type of overload, but there are others including: i) the number of topics we might be interested in, ii) the number of books, articles, videos and experts we can find on each topic, iii) the number of useful things we learn that we want to remember, and so on. Usually the overall feeling is a sense of feeling tiny and insignificant against the torrent of information.

When using spaced repetition flashcards, the user is often supposed to practise every flashcard on the day that it has been assigned. However, if the user takes a day or two off - for sickness, holiday, or any other reason - those flashcards get added to the next day's review. Over time, the number of outstanding flashcards can become overwhelming and demotivating.

Furthermore, to even make good flashcards in the first place, we need to deal with the overload of sources that we can learn from, and notes that we can make. We need a system to manage all those details and relieve us from the stress of trying to do it all in our heads.

Slow comprehension-building

Learning requires first building some degree of understanding, and then retaining it. While flashcards help with retaining knowledge, they assume that the step of initially gaining that knowledge has already been done.

Unfortunately, few users of flashcards also use effective methods for building deep comprehension. Consequently, this earlier stage, rather than memory, becomes the bottleneck to learning.

HOW TO USE FLASHCARDS MORE EFFECTIVELY

Put flashcards in their place

If you start looking at your non-flashcard learning (i.e. the bit where you read, think, ponder, question, etc.) as the primary part of your learning process, and flashcards only as a support to that process, then you’ll find that everything starts to work out:

• The big picture is always in focus, because it comes from your learning goals, and from the content you’re immersed in, rather than relying on your flashcards
• You actually understand what’s in your flashcards at a deep level
• Because you know that quality flashcards are based on the core ideas rather than fancy vocabulary and huge numbers of facts and details, you end up with far fewer flashcards, which add far more value

When 90% of your learning time is actually spent reading, thinking, evaluating, culling low value notes, and deeply engaging with ideas, when it comes to flashcards you can easily make a smaller number of high quality ones that will add real benefit to your long term knowledge.

Clarify your purpose

When you step back to look at the bigger learning process, it becomes clear how much impact a clarity of purpose can have. A clear purpose that goes beyond “memorising everything” from specific books, articles or courses, can help combat overload by giving you a naturally meaningful way of making informed choices about which few sources to focus on, and which to ignore. Your purpose also provides the best way to maintain the big picture, because rather than remembering things that might be useful later, you’ll be only picking out the things that are obviously useful to your goal.

In general, a learning goal will sound something like “I want to learn ___, because ____”. The part that follows the word “because” can vary in clarity and level of meaning, which impacts the entire learning process because it guides the many small decisions that are made along the way. In other words, a good goal is less about knowing what you’re learning, but why.

Focus on thinking

Storage in the human brain works via linking. To remember something new, you need  to link it to something else that you already know.

Because of this, the most valuable things you can memorise are meaningful ideas. These have many links to your prior knowledge. They are not just facts but ideas. Furthermore, meaningful ideas are those which you don’t just understand in isolation, but you can also see how they link to other ideas.

If you primarily make flashcards from concepts that you find highly meaningful, your knowledge will grow in leaps and bounds. In addition, by committing to think, challenge, tease out, and question as you learn, you can make sure that you’re building your own knowledge instead of just storing other people’s ideas.

Use incremental learning

When looking at the bigger picture of learning, it’s clear that individual sources (e.g. specific articles or books) don’t matter as much as the ideas you gain from them.

So, if you read the first few paragraphs of one article, and then do the same with several others, you may actually learn a lot more than if you read the first article start to finish. Then, if you go back after a couple of days, once the first ideas have sunk in, and continue reading the first article, you may likely understand so much more than if you just pushed through it all in one go. That’s because the other ideas you learned have had time to be digested first.

This approach can radically accelerate the comprehension stage, because it reduces the cognitive load, and increases the amount stored in long term memory. In turn, when returning after a break to read the next part of an article, you’ll find that you are reading it from a more knowledgeable perspective.

Curate and evaluate

As you learn, it’s important to let go of the desire to remember everything, because this impulse will naturally obstruct you from perceiving the value of what you’re learning. Only when you have to choose between remembering one thing or remembering another, will you be forced to really think about which one is more valuable.

Taking this approach is like curating a collection of art: you may begin with many pieces, but after careful consideration and selection, you can get rid of most of them, and retain only the very best pieces.

Value in learning can be identified in various ways, but a few guiding questions include: Does it make sense?Does it add something useful to what I know? Does it keep popping into my mind on its own?

Ultimately, lack of evaluation is a symptom of lack of comprehension. So if you’re cramming things left and right, slow down and think a bit more. Leave the flashcards until you’ve made sense of what’s important and what’s not. Then you can get greater benefit out of fewer cards.