A Learning Hack That Actually Works — Spaced Repetition Memorization
Using Cognitive Science to Improve K12 Education
I will be honest, I’ve always been a crammer. I got through high school and college by doing as little as I could to get through the classes that didn’t really matter. That mostly meant quickly memorizing everything I could in the couple days before a test. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.
As a Neuroscience student I got very good at, for instance, quickly memorizing the anatomical structure of different parts of the brain, but this also led to some mistakes in classes that I wasn’t invested in. Towards the end of school, it became a pretty big area for personal growth.
Part of my trouble was that I wasn’t really presented with good reasons to do it any other way. People would say vague things like “study consistently and use flash cards” but I’d gotten A’s through all of college and high school so I didn’t think it was necessary.
The problem now though, is that I want to achieve real mastery of tons of different useful skills, and cramming doesn’t really cut it as a way to build that expertise. On top of that, I’m now a high school teacher and I see the same bad study habits out of my students who are struggling to build the sequential knowledge needed to get…
