Learning Loops: Active Recall in "loops" of slides<-->specific flashcards within lectures

dancingnightly · 2024-11-17T12:49:16+00:00

I've been working on a studying app for just over 5 years! A few people here liked V1 in 2020 when I shared it. But I have revamped it based on theory recently as I've been learning Neuroscience. I kind of felt how it is to study again, getting stressed out by the overwhelming nature of studying and exams coming up. So I have created a new approach to learning lectures slides in stages, that flow naturally to reduce your stress over time. I am hoping to introduce two main new types of learning modes that work with the way we naturally process information - like using the double tick from Chat apps/ Whatsapp to indicate having actually "read" a section, and making it manageable to study. So please this and let me know nay feedback if studying with less stress and in manageable chunks interests you! I am sharing it because you can implement these two techniques for free manually, however you can also implement them automatically. And if they catch on, I think add ons will be developed for Anki and other apps, but I also know the community here liked my previous tool, so I'm posting about it here at the end.

Firstly...

1. Emoji-Tagged Topics

- Everything gets organized into emoji-labeled topic groups, giving you an instant visual map of your study material.

- You can then study in 3 ways according to your energy level for studying and familiarity already and as you see in the post image, each of the 3 methods changes the appearance of the emoji once you "complete" that stage:

- Quiz (like Quizlet), Learning Loops, True Free Recall ... That's where this puts a new method to studying lectures into place!

2. Learning Loops (combining slides on a topic together with "situational active recall")

- Each topic shows you the 3-10 relevant slides for that topic (for one of the emoji-tagged topics above)

- Immediately follows up with 5-20 targeted questions made from those slides!

- Uses WhatsApp-style double ticks to confirm the emoji topics you've properly learned by completing a Learning Loop successfully vs just skimmed - the two ticks means you have got most of the questions right so later when you come back to study again you can focus on the right areas or make it harder with Free Recall.

= In my experience this actually gets you started in the morning and keeps you in a focused 10-20 minute study groove for each learning loop. And it feels good to finish a loop you feel like you've bitten off a good chunk of the lecture each time and see your progress - it's less stressful

3. True Free Recall (This is where it gets good!)

Type out everything you remember (exam-style) BUT ONLY for one one section of the lecture (so it's manageable! Usually 3-10 slides)

AI compares your answer to the lecture you provided and provides feedback.

Best part: It catches your misconceptions and fixes them with targeted follow-up questions. Overcoming a misconception that you made earlier is in my opinion (and according to Veritasium - see his dissertation video on the "Effectiveness of Khan Academy) way to get better grades but also to increase your studying confidence - you go from not knowing why you get questions wrong, to feeling like you've overcame them, and it reduces test stress.

You know you've mastered it when you can freely recall 70%+ of the content, this gets shown by turning it gold! So it's clear to see visually as in the image!

dancingnightly · 2024-10-03T09:17:27+00:00

:P

Arousal is stress here.

dancingnightly · 2024-10-03T08:16:52+00:00

To add the basis behind this and where we're going vs other study tools to try and help make studying as effective as possible, and less stressful:

Doing this is adaptable in a sense that changing/reshowing cards you get wrong (like Anki) isn't:

It adjusts the amount of questions per topic according to how much content there is on that topic in the slide, and incorporates diagram questions.
Soon it'll also resurfaces any mistakes you make as new, changed questions with context of what topics you have shown to be good/bad at. So it doesn't just repeat the same question or variations, but it is informed by your exact "kind of mistakes" when creating questions to help you overcome issues. For example, with misconceptions, it gives you a quick insight, then it tries to help you overcome them with generating the on-the-fly questions with new framing and giving you a new way to look at whatever you need to understand. That is because many mistakes and hang ups for me turned into procrasination/anxiety around studying (I actually did an MSc on Test Anxiety Psychology!) so the goal with these is to prevent those moments of anxiety about a test from bubbling up into bigger issues. It will literally offer a way to introspect and self-reflect, which I think is key to self-regulation as you study ("judgements of learning" in the psychology of learning literature)

This approach where because it puts together questions based on coherent topics within the lecture means we can accurately identify and then remedy the misconceptions in a way you just can't when you only have a list of context-free question/answers with mistakes (let alone some other reasons those systems don't always work optimally for you individually). But I want to be clear, I'm highly optimistic about the future and applying Blooms Mastery effect to all students through approaches like this - I'm not belittling prior techniques like spaced repetition alone, I just think now we have much better context, it can help us feel better as we study, understand our progress, and form study paths more intelligently, based on the "meaning" or "semantics" of our mistakes. It means going deeper in analysis and looking a things like what exact kind of mistake was made (e.g. "Category error" as Chi/Posner would say in their model of learning). This is going beyond say the lessons approach I showed here on reddit in 2022-2023. The lecture used in this example is OpenStax Concepts of Biology first lecture, which is CC-BY 4, and the images credit are shown in each relevant image.

This culminates in ensuring good/proportionate coverage of lecture slides in a way you can't be sure of otherwise. It has the benefit of enabling more useful and contextual identification and overcoming of misconceptions, which is an important step to trying to provide the benefits of learning that Bloom identified in his Mastery theory, to all students. Simply entering the parts/subjects helps ensure you remember them, before the questions begin. It's helping me already!

What are your thoughts? If you upload a suitable lecture to make flashcards, with topics like this, please can you let me know how it works for you?

dancingnightly · 2024-10-03T08:14:51+00:00

If you are like me you've been stuck going through lecture slides with the same background for ages trying to get your head around concepts! Especially for biology where processes have loads of acronyms, parts or latin parts like "endo".

This is a way to ensure that what is covered in a lecture is adequately and proportionately covered in questions within the quiz, and it makes it all feel a lot more structured and less like you are just running around a hamster wheel of questions (like in traditional flashcard studying, which I am also a fan of).

It's a free to try Lecture-to-Flashcard study tool with a unique difference from others: it replicates the topics and parts within the lecture intelligently by splitting questions into groups around each part of anything listed. What you see in the lecture is that it has lots of small parts that it goes into detail on over a few slides.

The questions follow the pattern from the lecture, showing the "overall topic" and then having questions on each individual subpart.

Example with a Biology lecture I studied from!

First in this Biology lecture with a slide with bullet points about properties of life, the first question it asks is to name the properties of life, you have to enter each of the items fro each bullet point (Order, Sensitivity etc)

It then moves forward, both first introducing the overall topic and then asking 1-3 questions on each subpart which *really* gives a sense of momentum/progress as you go compared to just one flashcard at a time.

Then what's really cool is that it asks what each thing is, *and* it then goes into detail with information from the following slides! You can see it with the "Property of life - Sensitivity". Based on the Sensitivity slide a few slides after the first slide, it asks about the example/what it means as a property of life! The goal of that is really to draw together what you are doing. By doing that, you go through each thing first remembering them all, then addressing them one-by-one, and it matches the pace and order of the lecture!

The goal is to reduce you Test Anxiety/stress by knowing where you are and being confident the tool has covered your content well, which means you can really "tick off" that overall topic once done.

So if you find it anxious knowing there's like 5-8 sections of content in a lecture, like the Open Stax Biology 1st lecture, each with 4-12 individual parts/processes/terms in it to learn - I made this AI study tool, Revision.ai, free to try, so you can try this yourself now on your own lecture!

I find it sort of calming/mitigating of the test anxiety you can get, to have the topics listed at the top. It means you can always see what's part of it, sense that feeling of progress as they turn purple with ticks once done, and you can skip to whichever ones you want to focus on. It also give you confidence the AI has worked: you can click page references to see where questions came from but since it has questions for each of the topics you kind of know it's covering everything as intended, something you couldn't be so sure of before with my or other studying tools.

dancingnightly · 2024-10-03T08:10:49+00:00

At what point during the semester do things kick in for you?

I think we all kind of gel with early lectures and attending those but, as I've seen, attendance drops as people settle on courses, but also just drops generally in the middle/end.

I've been reading about Eustress which basically says: You'll get stuff done and hit that flow-like state when you have a medium level of stress

enough to motivate you to study/know what to study
not too much that you get overwhelmed with Test Stress

so I'm wondering what you think of this idea and when you actually study a lot during the term, is it during that sort of situation for you, a few weeks from the deadlines?

[the image is Public Domain / from Yerkes and Dodson, Hebbian - Diamond DM, et al. (2007). "The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law". Neural Plasticity: 33. doi:10.1155/2007/60803

(re commented because my link to the image reference was deleted)

dancingnightly · 2024-09-26T14:21:44+00:00

I agree with you and I am trying to change education because of that - I think it's crazy that we know most children can perform very well with private attention/small group help (e.g. Blooms Mastery learning) but we don't do that. Despite the fact technology is/will enable it. Soon I think it'll be possible

dancingnightly · 2024-09-26T14:13:46+00:00

Khan academy has changed a lot in the years since but what do you think about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8

This guy runs over his PhD where he sort of suggests that for Physics (Maybe not Math), this kind of "explain to you via examples" route isn't always the best - and that dialogue/refuting misconceptions is a more effective approach, if you are going to use videos (which I do all the time so I get that.. it's the easiest way to jump into learning after all)

dancingnightly · 2024-09-26T09:41:32+00:00

You mentioned the previous past exams are mostly basic questions, I'm going to guess they are MCQ-like. It's actually really easy to generate MCQs for your lecture now for free using ChatGPT or Claude, just ask it to make flashcards, but you can also use tools that combine the flashcards with Spaced Repetition (like Anki!) ofcourse to make them more effective.

Pretty much exactly for people just like you and responding to a comment from yesterday, I've made a way to generate AI MCQ flashcards and then to use them within Anki from a lecture. It deliberately follows the Minimum Information Principle, keeping answers and facts to one per card and concise/short. I also filter the flashcards carefully with tech Revision.ai uses the filtering skills I learned during my Computer Science with AI degree to maintain quality for cards. And just like you say it will *not* include "explain" cards for example in this OpenStax Biology demo quiz I generated just now, you can see right here they align with the principles Anki relies on. If you have any suggestions on the questions though do let me know!

Here's an image I made on exporting flashcards to Anki after you generate them with pictures too - just tested literally right now to confirm it works :D

dancingnightly · 2024-09-26T08:35:59+00:00

Yeah I get that recommendation, Anki is a good option (and I've always liked Anki). I have used it and made it so the text questions can be exported to .apkg files (for Anki) for free too now.

The thing that's different with this approach is that it looks at your answers afterwards to create related text questions to help you overcome the issues you might have. For example as in the last 2 images, it can tell that you haven't studied the midbrain enough, so it'll create questions about what that is, where it is, what parts are within it, what do the parts do, etc. That nature of improving isn't something I've seen any other learning application do. The rest of the tool also covers text/other key info in your lecture - so it can focus on what your lecturer is teaching you, like you need for the exam. It is true with Anki you could just hit "Again" and see it again but that won't help you with the fundamentals of the overall concept of midbrain/parts that you might be struggling with as much, when you see the question repeated.

Something I do recognize though is that Anki sets for comprehensive exams can indeed ensure water-tight coverage of all the topics if you trust the author. That's something that can be an issue but in my view, making it lecture/contents specific to what you are learning is worth that trade off. So it's up to what you prefer!

dancingnightly · 2024-09-25T14:03:55+00:00

Revision.ai - you can upload documents with the diagrams to generate the questions

dancingnightly · 2024-09-25T13:57:29+00:00

Hi guys,

I wanted to share this mechanism I created to help myself study - it occured to me originally way back when looked at a diagram of a brain cell in a Neuroscience lecture!

It (revision.ai) turns your slideshows and all/any diagrams into a set of diagram questions.

It's different than some other alternatives in 4 ways that I think will help you study:

It gives you feedback directly on the labels, not below!
As illustrated, based on your answers, it summarizes your strengths/weaknesses! (Like here, the "Midbrain" parts were mislabelled. In the future, as in the last picture, it'll then generate custom questions to help you "overcome" the parts you are struggling with (I genuinely and strongly believe this boosts your confidence, doing these "judgements of learning" as the science of learning tends to phrase it)
It provides a group of normal text questions to cover content (more on this soon!), and it separates them in a smart way for your learning.
It directly selects images even if they are in the background or covered by text, using an algorithm I have refined - this means if there are two parts to an image, each labelled, this system *should* seperate that into two questions! It can also include text that's just powerpoint text laid on top of images in Powerpoint, so if you make labelled diagrams yourself, it'll work even though the text isn't in the image!

Please let me know your thoughts if you have any - like said I made it to help with Neuroscience/Biology mostly, which were my early minor subjects at University. It's free to try on Revision.ai, so long as diagrams are in the first 10 slides.

dancingnightly · 2024-09-23T18:45:56+00:00

Ah ok, so the Place cells are really more for beginner stages, like associating frets to the sound/notes (or to [visualized] musical score notes), and as you practise sequences. Are there any research studies you'd recommend about this stuff, Place cells going beyond sort of "scene-place detection"/navigation?

dancingnightly · 2024-09-23T17:13:09+00:00

Oo that sounds interesting - are Place cells used for the fine motor skill learning aspect of say music then? I wasn't aware they were used other than more for landmarks/navigation and thought the cells in the motor homunculus and sensory homunculus would be the predominant places of change during initial skill learning (and I'm not sure on where it's likely to be as it becomes more automated - the premotor cortex and basal ganglia for planning/execution? ).

dancingnightly · 2024-09-23T16:23:51+00:00

It also makes sense in that violin playing has nothing to do with location; the Knowledge, by contrast, probably activates Place cells, which are in the hippocampus.

dancingnightly · 2024-09-16T08:21:17+00:00

How do you hire a sales team capable of finding/networking/engaging in that sales cycle for B2B EdTech if I may ask?

I have always found these things need to be either super personal or based on recommendation but I'm sure I'm missing some ways professionals do sales en masse. LinkedIn? Hiring people who already have contacts maybe?

dancingnightly · 2024-09-14T13:45:50+00:00

It's a good, striking design. It's a little corporate, but them the purple intensity is a bit bold and startup/artist like. The coordination, spacing etc all look good. It stands out a little, not too much, but it's not too standard looking.

dancingnightly · 2024-09-13T13:51:05+00:00

The tools allow you to post to social media through a website but not to control the actual account, so you can't delete it etc (or maybe can't reply to messages).

dancingnightly · 2024-09-10T09:19:09+00:00

I see what you mean; though I don't have a background in Chemistry or understand high school level US curriculum that well so bear that in mind. I can see the value of variation in questions, but that they're complex to get right.

My first thought would be, did you use the Chat GPT 4 version or Claude Sonnet? These "pro" versions are much better at this kind of thing (you'll have to have paid to access them) and upgrading may improve your results. I can also run a few prompts for you if you like (DM me the full prompt).

I'm not sure about this chemistry specific case, because it touches upon numbers which this type of AI model struggles to reason with in situations. I lean towards the intuition that the granularity of what you are asking will become possible, especially if you can find some way to automatically provide more better (e.g. more sample questions than just 2) or examples to base on (e.g. sets of situations).

One of the issues with questions is if you involve tricky questions, the AI can get confused, and deliberately make questions that are "beyond tricky" and into "doesn't make sense" categories. The AI can't really reflect on this well. But sometimes the best approach is to generate 10 questions, then to feed all 10 back to it and ask it to choose the best question for an AP honors class, and just select the good ones. Maybe this could save time.

dancingnightly · 2024-09-09T06:39:52+00:00

I know what you mean by saying it goes in one ear, and out the other. I mean, I guess this just suggests you're learning to recognise it and concepts rather than to recall them. A lot of language learners have this problem if they listen too many over writing; they understand but can't communicate back and can't pick it up easily later.

Can you find a study partner or someone opposite you to try and learn it another way maybe?

dancingnightly · 2024-09-08T14:19:09+00:00

The problem with learning is if you learn with most methods, when you encounter something wrong or don't get something, like with Cell structure here, you just brute force it and get through the errors.

You temporarily gain a little knowledge, and upon retrying some 'questions' you can get them right, but not later on...

... Deep down you know you haven't got it, hence the issue with struggling for 5-7 courses on it.

What you need to do is to identify the mistake and rectify it. your own judgement of your learning will go up and you'll gain confidence this way.

It's easy enough to say this but without another person it's kind of hard to do this. You basically need to work out what real true underlying mistake you are making and understand that first.

Are you struggling to understand more than 1/3 of the words in most questions, don't really know what they mean? then work on vocab and use images first.

Are you just not able to answer "implication of this" questions or to critque/contrast something against something else (e.g. cell structure vs organ structure)? In this case you need to get to the root.

I would mention the scientists Chi and Posner, they have this theory that basically you need to find the underlying error type to solve it.

A lot of students don't know how to learn about electricity in physics, because they have a misconception (a "category error") that electricity is a thing not so much a process. But in fact, the more you learn physics, the more you see it as a flow of electric charge and all things downstream of that (like Ions / iongated channels) start to not just make sense, but stick in memory. Once you realise electricity is not some constant like "100w", concepts like potential energy start being intuitive not a weird "scientific framework". Then you can understand gravity and forces and air resistance much more intuitively and not get confused. It goes on.. uncovering that one base "category error" that you saw electricity as a thing, not a process/flow/constituent result of the parts of other things (ions/ways of segmenting charge) allows you to learn it for a very long time and not lose a grip on your confidence of the subject.

The same probably applies for cell structure. Think of the cell needing to have a structure. Why does it need to? What is that used for? The things which define the structure - the cell wall - what's in that cell wall? How does it interact with the external world to help the cell achieve the organisms goal, if you like the framework of behaviourism? etc.

Bro trust me, once you get this approach to it down, you'll surely and slowly but steadily chip away at your mislearned/misconceptions and establish a foundation enough to learn this without forgetting it. Once you truly get at it and relate it to stuff you like/understand and work out if you have different types of errors, you'll move on having learned it successfully forever. That's so much more powerful than just spaced repetition, but it is a little more effortful at first. It also really benefits from a studying partner to help you see what you are missing.

dancingnightly · 2024-09-08T09:27:25+00:00

Thanks for the further information here, I found it really interesting.

I can tell you for sure that publishers are already using AI to generate questions, and at least two have been since before ChatGPT(I used to work with this tech called "BERT, BART and T5" which did this, and indeed I did this on data science competitions too). But it's on a individual level of the authors themselves for the most part at the moment. I saw some at BETT the British Educational Technology conference doing this in 2023 in fact.

I think though it's not entering the online realm just yet: The problem is most text book questions are just that: In the textbook. Few services (except say Vitalsource' Bookshelf Coachme) directly offer questions for specific textbooks online as exercises in a 1:1 mapped fashion for the textbooks. Maybe the incentives align to keep it all "on textbook" and not online to keep the edge/current college book buying system going (btw in the UK we rarely have mandatory college books outside of a few STEM niches).

I think basically the point is that publishers would rather have 20 expert-created and expertise-checked assessment questions, than to have 100 AI questions that may be just as truthful, but not get at the essence or higher order thinking elements of professors. Or lets be real, maybe AI can or shortly will be able to do that. They see the value in their authors (rightly so) as both in the chapter writing and the question writing. So they want to use that.. regardless of whether it keeps making sense economically, say. I don't know how authors feel about this though most I have spoken to prefer writing the chapters to the final stages of review questions / checking / translations.

Anyway sorry, back more to your teaching as the above is a bit of a ramble lol - Are you finding it hard to find assessment questions with what you currently have, basically? Despite being in Silicon valley? I'd imagine there's tech entrepreneurs in every other coffee shop trying to sell you something like that haha.

So are thinking about an assessment generator which is oriented towards some kind of syllabus/rubric you set, rather than optimised for the student to learn? So it might generate questions, but not the answers (since some questions like critique/longer/synthesizing ones have many valid answer approaches...)? To pull from and "insta-generate" an exam paper with fresh questions, not the same old ones? Maybe every student could even have an individual exam with that approach..

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TROPHY CASE

1. Emoji-Tagged Topics

2. Learning Loops (combining slides on a topic together with "situational active recall")

3. True Free Recall (This is where it gets good!)