Can Technology Help Us To Study Smart?

Anki flashcards is a fantastic free resource that has allowed me to simply upgrade the basic methods that I have already been using for years at school and throughout five years at university to test myself on how well I remember content for exams.

It is based on the idea of spaced repetition& when you first study something, you start at the top of a memory curve that begins to drop over time as you don`t review that topic. If you don`t come back to something regularly, you will naturally forget much of it over time. This impacts the approach that many students take in studying for exams. They review a topic, makes notes on it, and weeks or months later they then take these out and put a huge amount of effort into learning this material in a very short space of time. This is not studying smart. This may be a sufficient technique to pass an exam, but it is not how you will excel.

Anki has developed a highly effective algorithm that, based on how confidently you remember material, calculates the most effective time to present the material to you again in the future, at the optimum moment before you forget it. You can quiz yourself on a vast amount of content in a very short time in order to maximise how much you remember. It is something that, as part of your daily routine, can make the typically arduous process of remembering information into an easier, enjoyable and effective process.

The reason I think this is such an important technique to share with my students is that it elevates the study resources that they have already been taught to create in school, such as flashcards, mind maps and revision notes, to an incredibly smart studying technique through spaced repetition.