{"id":171,"date":"2019-04-23T03:48:35","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T10:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/?p=171"},"modified":"2019-05-26T17:25:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T00:25:12","slug":"theory-behind-anki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/theory-behind-anki\/","title":{"rendered":"Theory Behind Anki"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This post covers the theory behind Anki and follows the previous post <a href=\"http:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/anki-introduction\/\">introducing Anki<\/a>. The last post in this series describes best practices for using Anki. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the best <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Meta-analysis\">meta-analyses<\/a> reviewing best approaches to learning is <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/full\/10.1177\/1529100612453266#\">Improving Students\u2019 Learning With Effective Learning Techniques<\/a> by Dunlosky et al. If I were to summarize its 50+ pages in one paragraph, it would be: The most utility for improved learning is provided by distributed practice and practice testing, followed by interleaved practice, elaborative interrogation, and self-explanation. In contrast, popular techniques such as highlighting and rereading provide only low utility for learning. The meta-analysis was done in the context of students&#8217; learning, but the top techniques were shown to benefit learners across varying ages and abilities. This makes these techniques applicable to lifetime learning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anki implements the above mentioned top two techniques directly and provides a way for the third most useful practice. Let&#8217;s examine these three techniques in more detail:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>practice testing (a.k.a. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Active_recall\">active recall<\/a>): memory needs to be actively stimulated during the learning process, which is what Anki does by showing questions that the user must answer.<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Distributed_practice\">distributed practice<\/a> (a.k.a. spaced learning): learning is broken up into several short sessions over a long time. Anki schedules flashcards for review based on an algorithm over a long period.<\/li><li><a style=\"font-size: 1rem;\" href=\"https:\/\/academicaffairs.arizona.edu\/Interleaving\">interleaved practice<\/a><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;\">: mixing multiple subjects or topics while studying improves learning. Anki cards are organized in decks and Anki encourages users to limit the number of decks being reviewed. Since decks are reviewed in succession, ideally all the Anki cards are within a single deck to ensure that knowledge from different subjects is reviewed at the same time. <\/span><br><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Another great source of the theory behind Anki is a lengthy article by Michael Nielsen titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/augmentingcognition.com\/ltm.html\">Augmenting Long-Term Memory<\/a>,&#8221; where the author lists many historical underpinnings for memory augmentation. It is surprising that as early as in 1885, some scientists studied memory decay, see &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/psychclassics.yorku.ca\/Ebbinghaus\/index.htm\">Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology<\/a>&#8221; by Hermann Ebbinghaus. For a modern take on memory decay, read &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/augmentingcognition.com\/assets\/Settles2016.pdf\">A Trainable Spaced Repetition Model for Language Learning<\/a>&#8221; that describes an algorithm used in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.duolingo.com\/\">Duolingo<\/a>, an excellent app for learning foreign languages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of his article, Michael Nielsen goes through a rough estimate of the effort needed to remember one piece of information. It assumes that the user takes just a few seconds to recall a fact listed on an Anki card when it is scheduled. If her effort is spaced over twenty years in ever increasing intervals, the total time spent on the card is about 5 minutes. This sounds like a decent trade-off: spending a total of 5 minutes over twenty years will result in remembering one particular flash card. In other words, it will take an average of only 7 minutes daily to remember 10,000 flashcards for twenty years!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post covers the theory behind Anki and follows the previous post introducing Anki. The last post in this series describes best practices for using Anki. One of the best meta-analyses reviewing best approaches to learning is Improving Students\u2019 Learning With Effective Learning Techniques by Dunlosky et al. If I were to summarize its 50+ &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/theory-behind-anki\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Theory Behind Anki&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paAAlH-2L","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":180,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/anki-best-practices\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":0},"title":"Anki: Best Practices","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"April 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This post concludes the series of posts on Anki and follows the post introducing Anki and another one about the theory behind Anki. I have been using Anki for five years and achieved high consistency in completing daily reviews. Here are my best practices: Be selective about cards you create\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anki&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anki","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/anki\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":154,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/anki-introduction\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":1},"title":"Anki: Introduction","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"April 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the first article in a series of posts about Anki, a spaced learning system to improve users' long term memory. The next article in this series will cover the theoretical background of spaced learning, and the final article will concentrate on best practices using Anki. I have been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anki&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anki","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/anki\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Starry1-1.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Starry1-1.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Starry1-1.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":238,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/mona-lisas-video\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":2},"title":"Mona Lisa&#8217;s video","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"June 16, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"For centuries, people have wondered about Mona Lisa's smile. Now they can stop wondering and just watch her videos. A group of AI researchers published a paper titled \"Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models\", where they describe a new algorithm to generate videos of peoples' heads (talking\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Machine Learning&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Machine Learning","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/machine-learning\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Gans.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Gans.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Gans.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/codingrestart.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Gans.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":69,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/ml-msdn-and-xavier\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":3},"title":"ML: MSDN and Xavier","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"January 19, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Microsoft\u2019s MSDN magazine for its development community has been publishing quite a few introductory articles to Machine Learning (ML) over the past few months. January's issue emphasizes ML with another series of articles, albeit with differing qualities. I liked this quote from the editorial \"Advancing AI\": \u201dML is a huge\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Machine Learning&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Machine Learning","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/machine-learning\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":51,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/really-old-geek\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":4},"title":"Really Old Geek","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"December 28, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"The New York Times published an article about Donald Knuth \u201cThe Yoda of Silicon Valley\u201d. The article might idolize his work and impact, but provides a great overview of his work. Mr. Knuth is a living legend in the field of computer science, known mainly for his seminal book on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;C\/C++&quot;","block_context":{"text":"C\/C++","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/uncategorized\/cc\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":110,"url":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/lessons-from-rework\/","url_meta":{"origin":171,"position":5},"title":"Lessons From re:Work","author":"Viktor Sanek","date":"February 10, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Recently I discovered re:Work, a website where Google shares its knowledge about human resources and management. In this post I highlight a few of the articles that I found inspiring. A thought provoking article \u201cChanging the Change Rules at Google\u201d covers a new approach to reorgs. As a large, fast\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Management&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Management","link":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/category\/management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codingrestart.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}