Problem is that people greatly prefer the low result study techniques since they requires less mental effort. It has been known for a while that they are bad, but since doing those allows people to study more hours for same amount of effort they do it anyway.
Not surprising highlighting has low impact. I never understood how people could thing that just putting color over something would help in anyway. Also that was one of the feature my former lab used to promote in its learning software and happily wrote cringe research papers about. I understand why: it's both easy to implement and track, which makes it a good feature for low-effort papers.
I've practiced highlighting on and off over the years, but it's never been for memorization. I've mainly used it to separate out critical passages to speed up and simplify future reading.
Absolutely this. I use it on my Kindle all the time for this same purpose, and come back to some of them when I know the Chapter they are in and I need to refresh a concept or phrase.
"Low" doesn't mean bad. Sure, practice is better than highlighting/rereading, but I expect that practice fails if the student makes a mistake that can be cured by re-reading. Also, practice takes a lot longer (costs a lot more), so it better have higher impact.
Highlighting is an indexing technique, and maybe a marginal improvement to reading. It's a piece of a solution.
One round of highlighting is almost worthless on its own. BUT. "Progressive summarization" (term coined by Tiago Forte) starts with broad highlighting, followed by 1-2 more rounds of increasingly refined highlighting, and finally rewriting material in own words based on the last round of highlights. Leads to deeper understanding and recall etc.
When I was in law school, I highlighted in different colors to mark different parts of cases (facts, procedural posture, legal holding, etc.). I found this to be very helpful, both when I was marking up cases, and when I was reviewing the cases and able to quickly find the different elements. This is especially important in law school, where professors cold-call students and expect them to know various facts about each case at a moments' notice.
I've made plenty of flashcards during undergrad and creation can definitely be both high effort and low effort. Low effort copy and paste from textbook, high effort when using a plugin for anki can mean obfuscating multiple parts of an algorithm/tree. I'm proud of my best flashcards - but is there any evidence that creation + studying is more effective than studying alone over the same timeframe? Anki suggests that on their site but I haven't seen much evidence for it.
Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?
I'm not sure I understand what "study -> study" is. Is it studying without creating flash cards, or utilizing them? As in just studying the book, doing problems, etc?
If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).
Yeah my comment wasn't clear. Creating the flashcards is a slow process but supposedly imparts 'deeper' knowledge for the creator. That is the claim I'm curious about. Anki has shared decks that anyone can download and study [1]. Say someone has an exam coming up that they need to prepare for. They have two choices: study flashcards given to them, or make and study their own flashcards. For the sake of this example the deck that would be given to them and the one they'd make are identical and contain sufficient information to achieve a perfect score. 3 hypothetical scenarios:
- A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away.
- A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them.
- A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence.
Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive.
Making flash cards is in the low gain category, and that is very popular. Disciplined testing using those cards wasn't nearly as common from what I saw, people just made them and then forgot about them. Or just read through them without putting in effort trying to answer each one without looking at the answer. Doing those properly requires effort.
People do it all the time because it's fun and you get the initial kick. Like planning a budget, habits, hobby, exercise routine or spend a week collecting courses. Then the daily grind starts and you give up after a few days.
I, personally, just am reading a novel series Japanese, 8 books in. While reading, I have highlighted all the words/parts I didn't know in order to export them and make flashcards out of them. I haven't still started going through them, but the thought of doing so feels laborious, so procrastinating is bound to happen.
Finnish is a second language to me and what I've found better than flash cards is to just write down words I don't know as I'm reading. Initially this can seem terribkt slow because each book with have its own vocabularly set. As I continue if I read a word I don't know zi scan the list briefly. If it isn't there or I fail to see it I write it down again.
If you do not have time to study... I had to do long commutes while working part-time to get my CS degree.
Sometimes I was left with only 1 day of study for an exam and this was the best method for me.
