Flashcard

Not to be confused withFlash cartridge.

For the form of digital memory sometimes called a "flash card", seeMemory card.

A set of flashcards demonstrating theLeitner system.Cards that the learner knows are promoted to a box for less frequent review (indicated by green arrows); cards for which the learner has forgotten the meaning are demoted to be studied more frequently (indicated by red arrows).

Aflashcardorflash cardis a card bearinginformationon both sides, which is intended to be used as an aid inmemorization.Each flashcard typically bears a question or definition on one side and an answer or target term on the other. Flashcards are often used to memorizevocabulary,historical dates, formulae or any subject matter that can be learned via a question-and-answer format. Flashcards can be virtual (part of aflashcard software), or physical.

Flashcards are an application of thetesting effect− the finding thatlong-term memoryis increased when some of the learning period is devoted to retrieving the information through testing with proper feedback. Study habits affect the rate at which a flashcard-user learns, and properspacing of flashcardshas been proven to accelerate learning.

Use

Flashcards exercise the mental process ofactive recall:given a prompt, one produces the answer. Beyond the content of cards, which are collected in decks, there is the question ofuse– how does one use the cards, in particular, how frequently does one review, and how does one react to errors, either complete failures to recall or mistakes? Varioussystemshave been developed, mostly based aroundspaced repetition– increasing the time intervals between reviews whenever a card is recalled correctly.

Spaced repetition

Main article:Spaced repetition

Spaced repetition is anevidence-based learningtechnique which incorporates increasing time intervals between each review of a flashcard in order to exploit the psychologicalspacing effect.Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently. The use of spaced repetition has been shown to increase rate of learning.Although the principle is useful in many contexts, spaced repetition is commonly applied in contexts in which a learner must acquire a large number of items and retain them indefinitely in memory. It is, therefore, well suited for the problem ofvocabularyacquisition in the course of second language learning. Spaced repetition software has been developed to aid the learning process.

Leitner system

In theLeitner system,correctly answered cards are advanced to the next, less frequent box, while incorrectly answered cards return to the first box for more aggressive review and repetition.

TheLeitner systemis a widely used method of efficiently using flashcards that was proposed by the German science journalistSebastian Leitnerin the 1970s. It is a simple implementation of the principle of spaced repetition, where cards are reviewed at increasing intervals.

In this method, flashcards are sorted into groups according to how well the learner knows each one in the Leitner's learning box. The learners try to recall the solution written on a flashcard. If they succeed, they send the card to the next group. If they fail, they send it back to the first group. Each succeeding group has a longer period of time before the learner is required to revisit the cards. In Leitner's original method, published in his bookSo lernt man Lernen(How to learn to learn), the schedule of repetition was governed by the size of the partitions in the learning box. These were 1, 2, 5, 8 and 14 cm. Only when a partition became full was the learner to review some of the cards it contained, moving them forward or back depending on whether they remembered them.

Software

Main article:List of flashcard software

Example of a virtual flashcard: usingflashcard softwareAnkito review a mathematical formula. First, only the question is displayed. Then the answer is displayed too, for verification.

There is a wide range of software (includingopen sourceand online services) available for creating and using virtual flashcards as an aid to learning.

Two-sided cards

Physical flashcards are two-sided; in some contexts one wishes to correctly produce the opposite side upon being presented with either side, such as in foreign language vocabulary; in other contexts one is content to go in only one direction, such as in producing a poem given its title orincipit(opening). For physical flashcards, one may either use a single card, flipping it according to the direction, or two parallel decks, such as one English-Japanese and one Japanese-English. They have a number of uses and can be simple or elaborate depending on the user.

Example

An English-speaking student learning the Chinese wordNhân(rén, person or people):

Q: person

A: Nhân, rén

Reverse:

Q: Nhân

A: rén, person

Three-sided cards

Physical flashcards are necessarily two-sided. A variant, found in electronic flashcards, is what is known as athree-sided card.This is a particular kind of asymmetric two-sided card; abstractly, such a card has three fields, Q, A, A*, where Q & A are reversed on flipping, but A* is always in the answer – the two "sides" are thus Q/A,A* and A/Q,A*. Concretely, these are most used for learning foreign vocabulary where the foreign pronunciation is not transparent from the foreign writing – in this case the Question is the native word, the Answer is the foreign word (written), and the pronunciation is always part of the answer (Answer*). This is particularly the case forChinese characters,as inChinesehanziandJapanesekanji,but can also be used for other non-phonetic spellings, includingEnglish as a second language.

The purpose of three-sided cards is to provide the benefits of two-sided cards – ease of authoring (enter data once to create two cards), synchronized updates (changes to one are reflected in the other), and spacing between opposite sides (so opposite sides of the same card are not tested too close together) – without the card needing to be symmetric.

One can generalize this principle to an arbitrary number of data fields associated with a single record, with each field representing a different aspect of a fact or bundle of facts.

History

Paper flashcards have been used since at least the 19th century, withReading Disentangled(1834), a set ofphonicsflashcards by English educatorFavell Lee Mortimerbeing credited by some as the first flashcards.Previously, a single-sidedhornbookhad been used for early literacy education.

TheLeitner systemfor scheduling flashcards was introduced by German scientific journalistSebastian Leitnerin the 1970s, specifically his 1972So lernt man lernen. Der Weg zum Erfolg (How to learn to learn),while theSuperMemoprogram and algorithm (specifically the SM-2 algorithm, which is the most popular in other programs) was introduced on December 13, 1987, by Polish researcherPiotr Woźniak.