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What worked - and worked fast - were the Saxon Fast Facts worksheets.
Maybe this explains it:
Mr. Karpicke's studies suggest that if you want to implant facts in long-term memory, it's best to receive feedback on a quiz after a short delay of 5 to 20 minutes. But flashcards (at least as they are ordinarily used) give feedback immediately.
In an experiment presented last month at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Nate Kornell, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Robert A. Bjork, a professor of psychology there, asked people to study 20 word pairs on flashcards during a one-hour period.
Half the participants reviewed the full cycle of 20 cards eight times. The other half broke up the pile into small stacks, studying five cards at a time, reviewing them eight times, then moving on to the next small stack.
Early in the experiment, the people using the small stacks felt pretty good about their progress. They predicted (on average) that on the final exam, they would remember 68 percent of the words. The people studying the full stack, by contrast, predicted that they would remember only 53 percent.
But on the final exam administered at the end of the hour, their performance was actually the opposite. The people who repeatedly studied the full cycle of cards had an average exam score of 80 percent, while the "small stack" participants scored only 54 percent.
Now, you might say that's just because the "small stack" participants had forgotten the words that they studied in their first batches, early in the hour. But even on the words they studied in their last batch, the small-stack participants scored just 68 percent, so their performance still trailed that of the full-stack group.
This is just the latest piece of evidence, Mr. Kornell says, that cramming doesn't work. When you study an unfamiliar fact again and again in immediate succession, he says, it feels much better embedded in your memory than it actually is. It's much better to create an interval between the times you study an item. (The people cycling through the full stack of cards studied each card every seven minutes or so, which is a decent interval.)
Why Cramming Doesn't Work
The Saxon Fast Facts worksheets are designed to be done in 5 minutes or less.
C. used to do his sheet in 3 or 4 minutes (it would be 5 or a bit more the first couple of times, but he always progressed quickly).
Then I'd futz around finding the answer sheet & read him the answers so he could correct his answers.
So: time delay of a few minutes.
Those sheets worked like magic with another boy who was classified SPED. (High-end SPED: the kind of kid who wouldn't be SPED if schools practiced direct instruction and precision teaching.) His progress from one week to the next was almost bizarre. First time I gave him one of the sheets to do he took 10 minutes at least. Second time - one week later - he was down to maybe 7 minutes.
Third and last time: he came in under five with no mistakes.
You can buy the Saxon Fast Facts books as stand-alones, but you have to buy the solution manual, too, I think.
14 comments:
We had the same bad experience with flashcards and slow but steady progress with the worksheet pages in Math-U-See.
Having to write down the answer (and sometimes, they have the student write down both the problem and answer) may also be helpful.
Webster's speller also really accelerated her phonics and reading abilities--I think the spelling (we did mainly written, but some oral spelling as well) and writing of the words was helpful in some way.
Of course, I'm sure the syllables from Webster were helpful, too!
I found for myself study-wise, that if I wrote down key points, it was easier to remember than if I just looked at them in a book.
I always thought there was something special about writing - physically writing - things down. (And there may be.)
It never occurred to me that writing intrinsically slows the process, or that writing might serve as a form of spaced practice.
I've found a bunch of his work; it's all riveting. It's given me thoughts about a "new" kind of SAT test prep. (Will post later.)
Rafe Asquith tells his students specifically not to use flash cards.
His take on it is that kids need to duplicate the conditions of the test, which will be paper and pencil, not flash cards.
Given the hyperspecificity of learning, he's probably right.
But I'd put money on it worksheets provide a delayed feedback effect, too.
The speed at which C. & this other boy got their math facts as soon as we were using those long Saxon sheets was amazing.
ALSO: C. has an excellent memory. He remembers masses of material very quickly after reading or hearing it.
The fact that he didn't instantly know all his math facts using flash cards was quite striking at the time.
Then by the 2nd or 3rd Saxon work sheet he had them all.
What I really want to know now is the ideal interval.
I found another study from this group saying that the longer the delay the better.
I'm almost as confused about delayed feedback as I am about fractions & ratios.
I too remember things better by writing them down.
My own experience with flash cards isn't the "time" aspect, though, it's something else.
I never really knew how to get past this experience: I read the flash card, I don't know the answer, I look at the answer, I think "oh, right", and I move on.
I have a tremendously good memory at certain things, but the problem was the "oh right" wasn't the same as DOING a problem or writing down the answer, and so I *didn't know it*. It was the difference between recognition and recall: I couldn't recall because the flash card just stuck me in a loop of recognition, somehow.
was it just time? I don't know. Maybe, but for me, I think it was more that I just wasn't forced to "do" anything to create the answer so I never really learned it, and didn't have any negative feedback from getting it wrong.
That speaks volumes about curricula like Everyday Math where you learn a new topic superficially and without mastery before speeding on to the next completely unrelated theme. You may not revisit that topic until next year when the spiral bring you back to it. That is certainly anti-mastery as far as I can tell.
BTW, I love Saxon fast facts worksheets. We do a Saxon 8/7 lesson along with a Singapore 5B lesson each day. They actually work quite well together and the fast facts really develops that mastery and long term memory that I believe is so important.
I never really knew how to get past this experience: I read the flash card, I don't know the answer, I look at the answer, I think "oh, right", and I move on.
Exactly.
Kornell's articles talk about this effect with kids. It's an enormous problem.
It is also the reason I'm having my umpteenth battle with the district.
My district simply has no idea that students don't know what they don't know. None. They see student ability to study effectively as a simple matter of "maturity."
mI couldn't recall because the flash card just stuck me in a loop of recognition
"Research shows" (it does!) that our "feeling of knowingness" shoots up for the last item we've seen.
That's the flash card effect.
I found out early on that Kumon worksheets were much more effective than working with flashcards. There is a method to the progression of the worksheets very unlike the "holey cards" that my children have done these past two years as the answer to Every Math's lack of fact mastery.
The holey card is the same order of equations every time. It's not any better than doing flashcards, if you ask me. Kumon worksheets, on the other hand, mix things up and progress in difficulty. I imagine precision teaching worksheets would be even more effective.
"My district simply has no idea that students don't know what they don't know. None. They see student ability to study effectively as a simple matter of "maturity.""
I didn't know that I didn't know Engineering Mechanics after switching to a class without board-work in College.
I see my kids learn and memorize faster when i use flash cards.I put in little pictures to make it more colorful.
I believe flashcards are a very structured learning tool. They have been around for a while now an even I use them still. I'm doing some GRE practice using flashcards from funnelbrain and it seems to be most effective!
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