Making Better Flash Cards
As a warning, this post is a bit nerdy:
I’ve started taking a liking to flash/note cards, but they’re not for everyone. And you can also really screw up making flash cards. One blanket statement that I’ve heard in the past is that you have to limit the content on each card to one question. And if you try to load up too much information into one card, then you’re doing it wrong.
Well, that’s wrong. It depends completely on the information that you’re putting on the flash cards.
Two Types of Information
There’s two kinds of flash cards that you can make. I’ll call one “equal information” and the other “hierarchical information.” Equal information flash cards contain information that is all roughly of equal importance and should follow the one-idea-per-card rule. A good example of these would be language vocabulary cards or math flash cards. They’re built for pure memorization and it doesn’t matter how you memorize it – you’ve just got to do it. Grouping the information may help a little, but the gains are marginal. The best way to learn the information on these cards is to just grind away at the information.
On the other hand, hierarchical information flash cards can have more than one thought written on them. Your goal is not brute memorization, but compartmentalized learning. I learn better when I can clump groups of information together into logical, manageable chunks.
With these kinds of flash cards, you should actually stay away from trying to put just one idea per card. If you only put one idea per card, then shuffle the cards up, you’re going to have a harder time remembering the information because it will no longer be organized. You’ll end up learning things out of order when they really should be logically linked together by putting it all on one card. Good examples of hierarchical information flash cards would be science concepts or character summaries for an English class.
Of course, you can mix these types up to suit your personal needs. But it’s handy to remember that often the information that you’re trying to learn should determine the form of the flash cards you make.
In Sum . . .
That was probably too long of a post on flash cards, but high schoolers and headmasters will thank me.
