Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge - SuperMemo

To retain knowledge is ultimately to combat the inevitable human tendency to forget. This process occurs in all of us, and there’s no way to avoid it completely. However, certain strategies—spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, and mnemonics—can counteract your short- and long-term rates of forgetting and end up making a huge difference in your

Anki, are the preferred tool of more extreme ultralearners who want to squeeze out a little more performance. SRS is an amazing tool, but it tends to have quite focused applications. Learning facts, trivia, vocabulary words, or definitions is ideally suited for flash card software, which presents knowledge in terms of a question with a single answe

How do we combine the five principles? We want our original memories to be as deep and multisensory as possible (1: Make memories more memorable). We want to study as little as possible (2: Maximize laziness), and practice recall as much as possible (3: Don’t review. Recall). We want our recall practice to be challenging but not too hard (4: Wait,

Memory and understanding are connected. Having key information memorized so you can readily call it to mind releases mental power and helps you work more easily at higher conceptual levels. It also allows you to form mental patterns involving the subject you’re learning. To memorize information, test yourself through active recall (retrieval practi

These behaviors are what psychologists call “rule learning” and “structure building.” People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied later in similar situations.

Helmut D. Sachs puts it like this: “By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learnin

not face the trade-off problem between too many or too few topics, it too can lose its value when notes are added to it indiscriminately. It can only play out its strengths when we aim for a critical mass, which depends not only on the number of notes, but also their quality and the way they are handled. To achieve a critical mass, it is crucial to