> One strategy I find interesting is to give up on the customized > > per-user timing, and instead use a generic expanding schedule, putting > > the questions into something like a weekly quiz. The students don't > > have to do anything they wouldn't be doing anyway, so compliance is > > automatically 100%...
Certainly practical! It'd be great if students were continuing to retain useful information from courses *after* the course concludes, though, especially since the time cost to maintain mastery continues to decrease with ever-expanding intervals. In that sense, it seems worthwhile to encourage students to begin using a system that "lives on" after a semester-long course. All the same, I certainly think that spaced formative testing should be a part of just about any course I can imagine. > Sounds like an interesting study, although maybe a bit redundant with > > all the studies of medical students & doctors already done by Kerfoot > > and others. I'm familiar with that line of research. A few key differences are that the Kerfoot et al. program uses MCQs - very convenient to score automatically, but known to be significantly less effective than requiring students to *recall* information the way Mnemosyne does (vice simply *recognize* the right answer out of a MCQ menu). They also use a very coarse algorithm - "if right once, test again in 6 weeks; if right twice, delete the card; if wrong, show again in 3 weeks" (or some minor variant of that). That's probably valuable for certain purposes but it is quite different than what the Mnemosyne algorithm is trying to do. It seems misguided to assume that an item is mastered for eternity if it's answered correctly twice, or that 3 weeks is a good length of time to wait to test something that the learner got wrong. All interesting empirical questions! -Matt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mnemosyne-proj-users/f2161534-cd48-459e-ade7-28cf5e37015b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
