Flashcard

A flashcard or flash card is a card bearing information on both sides, which is intended to be used as an aid in memorization. Each flashcard bears a question on one side and an answer on the other. Flashcards are often used to memorize vocabulary, historical dates, formulae or any subject matter that can be learned via a question-and-answer format. Flashcards can be virtual (part of a flashcard software), or physical. A flashcard or flash card is a card bearing information on both sides, which is intended to be used as an aid in memorization. Each flashcard bears a question on one side and an answer on the other. Flashcards are often used to memorize vocabulary, historical dates, formulae or any subject matter that can be learned via a question-and-answer format. Flashcards can be virtual (part of a flashcard software), or physical. Flashcards are an application of the testing effect − the finding that long-term memory is 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 proper spacing of flashcards has been proven to accelerate learning. A number of spaced repetition softwares exist which take advantage of this principle. Flashcards exercise the mental process of active recall: given a prompt (the question), one produces the answer. Beyond the content of cards, which are collected in decks, there is the question of use – how does one use the cards, in particular, how frequently does one review (more finely, how does one schedule review) and how does one react to errors, either complete failures to recall or mistakes? Various systems have been developed, mostly based around spaced repetition – increasing the time intervals between reviews whenever a card is recalled correctly. Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique which incorporates increasing time intervals between each review of a flashcard in order to exploit the psychological spacing 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 of vocabulary acquisition in the course of second language learning. A number of spaced repetition softwares have been developed to aid the learning process. 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 or incipit (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. Physical flashcards are necessarily two-sided. A variant, found in electronic flashcards, is what is known as a three-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 for Chinese characters, as in Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji, but can also be used for other non-phonetic spellings, including English as a second language. An English-speaking student learning the Chinese word 人 (rén, person):