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How to make effective flashcards?

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How to make effective flashcards?


Flash cards are one of the most well-known ways to study, and for good reason: they encourage active recall, which is one of the best ways for our brains to learn. But many students use flash cards in ways that aren't very helpful. I don't want to say they use them wrong, but they don't work very well. According to the professional assignment helpers, people make some of the following mistakes when making and studying flash cards:

  • Making them in a way that only relies on learning by heart
  • Making cards that are hard to remember but don't force true recall, which leads people to think that remembering is the same as knowing.
  • When you use flash cards too much or when another tool or way to study would be better.

I'll talk about eight of these best practises in this article. Let's get into it.

1. Design your own flash cards.

Many people like to share their flashcard decks, and there are many apps and programmes that let you download already-made decks and start studying right away. I think using pre-made cards can be helpful sometimes, like when you have an unreasonable number of facts to learn and don't have much time, but making your own flash cards is usually better for your brain. One of the most important and integral parts of learning is the act of:

2. Taking in new knowledge

Trying to figure it out in your head, use it to make something new, like your own words, pictures, or ways to explain the information. This builds strong neural pathways that make it easy to remember what you've learned in the future. So, one of professor Marty Lobdell's tips in his Study Less, Study Smart lecture was to teach what you're learning. This forces you to put the information into your own words. When you use flash cards that have already been made, you skip that step. Most of the time, it's not worth it to save time. Also, if you make your own flashcards, you can change them to fit your needs and make them better.

3. Mix words and pictures.

Putting pictures on your cards can help people remember them. The Picture Superiority Effect is a concept in cognitive psychology that describes how people tend to remember pictures much better than words and mosty, it makes perfect sense. Written language has only been around for about 5,000 years, but Homo Sapiens has been roaming the globe for over 200,000 years, and our brains have evolved to be very sensitive to images. The places where food is and the animals that want to eat us or crush us are much more important to our brains than squiggles on a page. But this doesn't mean you should put pictures instead of words on your cards. Our brains are very flexible, and it turns out that pictures and words work better together than pictures alone.

4. Use mnemonics to make connections in your mind.

I decided to start learning and remembering the Periodic Table of Elements so that I could write this article. I thought this would be a fun challenge because I didn't take chemistry in high school, and I'm much more interested in science now than I was then. It also gave me the chance to make my own flashcards, which I can use here as examples. You can see some of my chemistry flash cards up there. They might look a little strange to you.

5. Divide difficult ideas into several questions.

This tip builds on the last one, but it's also important enough to be on its own list. Some ideas or concepts are too complicated to be put into one question. For flash cards to be a good way to learn about these kinds of ideas, they need to be broken down into multiple questions. Take the top card. I've coloured the Periodic Table this way to show how the elements are grouped. This is a great way to start learning about the elements.


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