Hello, As my first attempt at an experiment, I examined the use of Mnemosyne in the context of a Mandarin Chinese course. I had two groups, one of which used the off-the-shelf version of Mnemosyne and one of which used modified version that had no scheduling algorithm. (In other words, the second program always scheduled cards for review the next day, regardless of user input, so those users would activate just one or two sub-decks to study each day, depending on what they felt the greatest need to study.)
Because it was conducted in the context of an academic course and lasted for three full weeks, the experiment was difficult to control to any acceptable level of rigor, and the results are essentially confounded because so many factors (number of cards studied per day, number of cards studied in total, specific material studied, etc) varied from person to person and between the two groups. The differences between the two groups are still quite striking, though. Check out this box plot: http://tinyurl.com/cydnu4 It looks to me as though some folks were predisposed to score at or near ceiling level regardless of the intervention (as would be expected from a pool of subjects recruited from a class essentially to do extra coursework), and that this kept the means of the groups from separating. However, the large discrepancy of variance between the groups suggests that the spaced repetition intervention is boosting the scores of low performers—for whatever reason, be it the spacing effect or else a simple cultivation of good daily studying habits. To quote from my introduction, "This thesis argues that the spaced repetition intervention resulted in a significant increase in evaluation scores and that the intuitive repetition intervention did not; that the spaced repetition intervention was in particular of better help to struggling individuals than the intuitive repetition intervention was; and that the spaced repetition intervention appeared to promote a distribution of scores in which subjects clustered closely in the higher score range, whereas the intuitive repetition intervention resulted in a wide distribution of scores with high intra-group variance. While the differences between the two intervention groups are clear, the present study was unable to determine which specific factor or factors contributed the most to the success of the spaced repetition group." I finished the first draft of my full manuscript today: http://tinyurl.com/cqfpjz It will need further revisions and copy-editing (see if you can find the error in the abstract!), but the content is essentially complete. —Bill --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
