I was wondering yesterday about SRS being useful for high school kids, mainly for learning words and grammar of foreign languages. It just seems that a SRS would make learning foreign languages in high school much easier, plus that with little effort you probably can speak a lot better than most of your fellow scholars.
So I mainly wondered: Are there persons here with high school kids, who recommended them (or maybe explicitly not) to use SRS? And if you don't have kids, would you recommend them using SRS if you had them?

EDIT: Or maybe there are people here who are in high school themselves Do you use Anki also for your high school foreign language study?

I'm definitely going to raise my kids with SRS. I can only imagine what a genius I would be if I had had SRS when I went to school. And I'm talking elementary school and onwards. Math? History? Geography? Religion? Pretty much everything kids think is hard (That is, not music, PE, art etc) is made so extremely simple. Find the important facts in the book. Put them in the SRS. Ace the test.

I will also put a lot of emphasis on analysis though. Simply remembering facts, while easy, isn't going to make you smart.

I tried persuading my little brother to use it for his A-levels, but I don't think he ever got round to it. I think for people who've studied a certain way for a long time aren't likely to want to change, even if it's demonstrably better.

Also, I was thinking that you could use it for music - you could list scales to practice, and see if spaced repetition applied to muscle memory too. More ambitiously, you could take bars and phrases and SRS those - anyone want to try?

I asked my niece why she would not like to give it a try. I have gone into raptures, pointing out the huge benefit how easily you get any vocabulary in your long-term memory.

her answer (age 13):
"Why work on the long-term memory? I learn this for this upcoming test. "

well ....

donjorge22 Wrote:you could list scales to practice, and see if spaced repetition applied to muscle memory too.

I think this would work. I remember a session I had while practicing a piece I believed to be incredibly hard (Mary had a Little Lamb). During the session I would watch television and simply practice during the commercials (as opposed to practicing for hours at a time). I found that I learned the required technique for the piece without much effort this way. I'm sure the pauses in between had a lot to do with it.

At the very least it would help you remember pieces better.

It depends on what section of music theory. I've just started using GNU Solfege (app which trains intervals, chords, scales, harmonics, the full banana), and I think it would be great if it was integrated with some sort of SRS system.

I think in High school there are a lot of subjects you are SUPPOSED to forget. Just having heard of those might be enough.
However for certain things that build on one another (language, math, physics) it could help a lot.

Music is a procedural skill, using different parts of the brain and shouldn't (theory says) benefit as much from spaced repetition as declarative skills. Spacing practice sessions a few hours apart: good. Spacing practice sessions days or years apart: not so much.

Maybe SRS would be good for retaining memorized pieces for a very long time--but that's not a skill that most musicians need.

I wish I were back in high school just so I could totally own history class. School culture places a lot of emphasis on declarative learning ("you remember all those dates and people? You must be smart!") and SRS would let you do that with a heck of a lot less time and effort than the usual study methods.

Caveat: SRS cards geared towards getting a good grade in a foreign language class will be different from cards geared towards proficiency: word-pair/cloze-deleted-grammar/inflection-exercise vs. sentences/call-response/monolingual-definition. That doesn't mean you won't learn anything from them, just that they're less than optimal. Fortunately, even an "honors" class moves pretty slowly ("Let's learn 800 words this year!") so you'll have plenty of study time left over.

HerrPetersen Wrote:I think in High school there are a lot of subjects you are SUPPOSED to forget. Just having heard of those might be enough.
However for certain things that build on one another (language, math, physics) it could help a lot.

I can't see how they could make subjects where you're supposed to forget what you learn. Of course, the teachers realize that NO one will remember what they learned at high school, but that's a problem with the education system and I still think it would be optimal if everyone remembered everything. With proper SRSing, that utopia could be made at least close to true.

SRS is great for long term memorization, but most of our educational system (except language study) is structured in a way that neither allows enough time to properly SRS, nor is it necessarily to remember after you pass the mid-term and perhaps final exams (depending on how your country works).

I don't know about you, but most of my school exams were so easy, that I could pass the exam with a near-perfect score in just one day of study. Heck, just listening in class was enough to pass most subjects with flying colors. Except chemistry. To this day, I have not the slightest idea of what "silver mirror test" really means.

Anyway, the main problem in school is not that the material is too hard (excluding some pointless memory exercises such as chemistry reactions and historical dates), but that the kids are not very keen on learning it. Come on, it's not like you people have never went to an exam unprepared.

I am currently in high school (going to second year). Our curriculum is roughly comparable to that of the UK 'A' levels. I only use SRS for languages; I've also taken language classes (not Japanese) where I didn't use an SRS and I can say that an SRS is definitely a great help.

However I don't use an SRS for non-language subjects because the amount of facts that I need to memorize is quite small; most of the learning, I feel, involves (a) understanding the small number of core principles deeply and thoroughly and (b) developing problem solving skills through problem solving.

For eg in maths we had to learn some basic calculus, including limits, continuity, differentiation and integration rules etc. Most of the "facts" have nice short proofs, and once I understand the proof it's pretty much impossible to forget it. Physics is similar; the Mechanics we learnt follows from Newton's Laws + the Gravitation Law (that's 4 facts!) and Electromagnetism from Maxwell's Equations (4 too). Although right now I do not know the electric field produced by, say, an infinitely long charged wire, I can derive it from Gauss's Law, there's no need to SRS it. I have heard on this forum that in higher math the proofs are much longer and more numerous and an SRS might be needed to remember them.

We will learn organic chemistry next year, and I will try SRSing it. As for biology, I dropped it =D but I guess an SRS would work well there. For history, it seems quite different from the US system; we are tested on ability to interpret sources (eg "What is the message of Source A", where a source is a poster, quote etc) and argue a point (eg "Gorbachev's reforms were the main cause of the collapse of the USSR. Do you agree?"), and putting in lots of facts would make for a pretty lousy essay.

I am interested in hearing what you guys think. Is there a way to use an SRS for my non-language classes that I have overlooked?

I personally thought the rules in math were almost impossible to remember. I'm still thinking of creating a deck with all the rules, starting from elementary arithmetics.

Tobberoth Wrote:I can't see how they could make subjects where you're supposed to forget what you learn.

There's a reason why programs like [url=]

HerrPetersen Wrote:I think in High school there are a lot of subjects you are SUPPOSED to forget. Just having heard of those might be enough.
However for certain things that build on one another (language, math, physics) it could help a lot.

There's a reason why programs like Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? exist.

I think that the objective of formal schooling isn't teaching things that will be useful or that you will want to remember for the rest of your life. After all, why would you want to remember all of those things if you don't even have a chance of choosing what you have to study?

Nevertheless, I think that SRSing would be a great help for kids. Not for remembering everything forever, but for managing and reducing the time they have to invest in studying for their classes. It's always better to spend 15 minutes a day everyday in studying, instead of cramming as crazy and stressing yourself each time a test approaches. SRS would help you to distribute your efforts evenly over time, thus reducing stress, and to save time for other things that are more interesting, productive or meaningful for you, like learning things chosen by yourself, playing, talking to your friends or family, exercising, sleeping, etc.

Should be added that proper use of the cramming function in Anki is really effective. Just that function would have helped me a lot.

Don't underestimate the potential of your mind to forget.
I also thought of that for these same calculus proofs and now I can't remember anything of it, just 10 years later.

It would be useful, but also unnecessary if you just wanted to use it for blitzing exams. When I was 16 I had been doing French for 10+ years, yet we were still expected to use phrases like "je joue au foot", and the mark to get an A* (highest grade) at GCSE was only 75%. So, yes, you could get 100% if you wanted to, but there's absolutely no point in doing so.

I think where SRS really comes into its own is if you want to broaden your knowledge of the world. You can SRS capital cities, lakes, rivers, mountain ranges, flags, poetry, literature, art, famous quotations, classical music, historical dates, political leaders, etc (basically anything that could come up as a question on University Challenge).

wildweathel Wrote:Music is a procedural skill, using different parts of the brain and shouldn't (theory says) benefit as much from spaced repetition as declarative skills. Spacing practice sessions a few hours apart: good. Spacing practice sessions days or years apart: not so much.

Maybe SRS would be good for retaining memorized pieces for a very long time--but that's not a skill that most musicians need.

You can definitely use SRS for procedural memory and music, but I don't want to get into another argument about what you can/can't SRS. ;p

Tobberoth Wrote:Should be added that proper use of the cramming function in Anki is really effective. Just that function would have helped me a lot.

Agreed. I get straight A's in most of my college classes because of this function. 20 minutes the day of an exam is all you really need for most tests.

Anki's cram function is how I passed my physics final last year and how I passed all of my philosophy exams this year.

I wish I discovered SRS while I was still in school. I've suggested SRS to a couple of my friends, but really to no success. The best I've gotten out of my friends is having them space studying apart at longer intervals. Basic SRS theory without a computer. Not the most effective, since you can't have different intervals on facts but it's still useful just spacing your cramming for a test apart. Seems like from the comments here, most people in general just don't care about long term retention. Obviously a problem with how our education systems are.

I wouldn't be too quick to throw stones at people in general. As I recall, there was a discussion about long-term retention here not too long ago. The fact is it sucks to keep knowledge around forever. SRS is a chain tying you to the past.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4532

wildweathel Wrote:The fact is it sucks to keep knowledge around forever.

That's not really a fact... and I imagine most people would disagree.

harhol Wrote:That's not really a fact... and I imagine most people would disagree.

Okay, fine. I'm sure everyone would like to always remember everything. Results? Yes! Who doesn't want results?

But the effort that goes into sustaining it? You mean I'll be reviewing this stuff forever? That scares normal people. We like to have knowledge forever, but we'd like more to believe that we've earned that right with no future obligation.

Forgetting is so painless it's just easier to ignore it.

SRS (usually) forces you to pay attention to what you forget. And most people aren't willing to hear the harsh truth there.

Everyone feels this way. School kids are just more honest about it.

wildweathel Wrote:

harhol Wrote:That's not really a fact... and I imagine most people would disagree.

Okay, fine. I'm sure everyone would like to always remember everything. Results? Yes! Who doesn't want results?

But the effort that goes into sustaining it? You mean I'll be reviewing this stuff forever? That scares normal people. We like to have knowledge forever, but we'd like more to believe that we've earned that right with no future obligation.

Forgetting is so painless it's just easier to ignore it.

SRS (usually) forces you to pay attention to what you forget. And most people aren't willing to hear the harsh truth there.

Everyone feels this way. School kids are just more honest about it.

I disagree.

unauthorized Wrote:I don't know about you, but most of my school exams were so easy, that I could pass the exam with a near-perfect score in just one day of study. Heck, just listening in class was enough to pass most subjects with flying colors.

I'm in high school right now and this statement basically summarizes my thoughts. The only class i use SRS for is my Calculus course, those derivatives and integrals get annoying. But beyond that just a read through before a test or quiz is enough for me to have learnt the material. Going the extra step to an SRS would be good, but a waste of time.

However, I do intend to use it for some other classes in the future as well but mainly for vocabulary purposes.