Seems to me like it would work; but to learn more general ways of thinking instead of specific facts, you’d need to have a class of questions on a card, instead of a single question. Essentially, we’d need to change the anki software to allow a type of metacard, with fairly flexible rules for generating question-answer pairs.
My experience has been that thinking through specific algorithms, especially in graph theory, has caused graphs in general to be easier to work with—which is to say that I expect rationality exercises like these would probably work. I will try to brainstorm ways to test this in the spirit of TrE’s comment.
Another way to accomplish this goal is to edit the card manually every time you see it, but then again, that takes quite a long time for each card.
Teaching procedural knowledge seems possible, from my personal experience (beware of generalizing, the usual disclaimers apply). Learning for my A-level, I have done well doing such things. In chemistry, I learned many reaction mechanisms, but when I looked at the cards, I didn’t think of the specific solution, but rather looked at what special functional groups there were and how they would react. I felt like I had to rediscover the solution over and over again each time I looked at the card. Of course, at a certain point, I simply remembered the cards and their solutions, so having multiple cards for teaching the same skill seems kind of sensible.
As I said, this worked quite well for me, I felt the exams were quite easy. I’m quite sure flashcards are about as good at teaching skills as they are at teaching facts, if done correctly. Whether or not procedural knowledge is more important than factual knowledge is a different question, but I’d assume so.
Seems to me like it would work; but to learn more general ways of thinking instead of specific facts, you’d need to have a class of questions on a card, instead of a single question. Essentially, we’d need to change the anki software to allow a type of metacard, with fairly flexible rules for generating question-answer pairs.
My experience has been that thinking through specific algorithms, especially in graph theory, has caused graphs in general to be easier to work with—which is to say that I expect rationality exercises like these would probably work. I will try to brainstorm ways to test this in the spirit of TrE’s comment.
Another way to accomplish this goal is to edit the card manually every time you see it, but then again, that takes quite a long time for each card.
Teaching procedural knowledge seems possible, from my personal experience (beware of generalizing, the usual disclaimers apply). Learning for my A-level, I have done well doing such things. In chemistry, I learned many reaction mechanisms, but when I looked at the cards, I didn’t think of the specific solution, but rather looked at what special functional groups there were and how they would react. I felt like I had to rediscover the solution over and over again each time I looked at the card. Of course, at a certain point, I simply remembered the cards and their solutions, so having multiple cards for teaching the same skill seems kind of sensible.
As I said, this worked quite well for me, I felt the exams were quite easy. I’m quite sure flashcards are about as good at teaching skills as they are at teaching facts, if done correctly. Whether or not procedural knowledge is more important than factual knowledge is a different question, but I’d assume so.