Learning With Flashcards
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
When I ask my students about their go-to study strategies, one strategy that is frequently mentioned is flashcards. This nicely aligns with research into the topic showing that generating and learning with flashcards is a common strategy among students (1). However, the question is whether students use flashcards effectively. For example, if students use flashcards simply as a tool to read the material over and over (rereading), they are not using flashcards to their full potential. On the other hand, if they use flashcards as a way to retrieve taught material from memory, it will likely lead to better outcomes and performance in the long run. Now, another question you could ask is: What should go on a flashcard? Students could generate flashcards with definitions and simple facts on them that they then use to study – let’s call this kind of flashcards detail-level flashcards. Alternatively, they could generate flashcards that are more conceptual where different concepts are connected with each other and information from different class sessions are integrated – we’ll call this kind of flashcards conceptual-level flashcards for now. The questions now are:
a) Are students more likely to generate detail-level, conceptual-level, or both kinds of flashcards if left to their own devices?
b) Does it make a difference in performance what kind of flashcards they are using?
c) And, finally, is it important that students generate their own flashcards or do they learn equally well with provided flashcards?
An experiment by Lin et al. (2) has explored these questions and – in addition – measured participants structure building ability. Learners with high structure building abilities are easily able to extract and make sense of taught material. They excel in creating a representation of the material allowing them to gain deeper understanding of it. Learners with low structure building abilities may struggle to come up with a coherent representation of presented material making it more challenging for them to process it. The authors of the paper wanted to find out whether individual differences in structure building ability would affect generating and learning from different types of flashcards.
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How did they investigate these questions?
They conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to study one of two text passages (biological anthropology versus geology) and then instructed participants to study in one of four conditions:
1. Provided-Flashcards: Participants were given premade flashcards from the textbooks to study with. These flashcards were heavily detail-level ones.
2. Self-Generated-Flashcards: Participants were asked to create their own flashcards.
3. Conceptual Self-Generated-Flashcards: Participants were instructed to create their own flashcards, but were provided instructions to use a conceptual approach.
4. Free-Study: Participants were instructed to study the text passage as they wished.
In the second experiment, participants were provided with either detail-level or conceptual-level flashcards to study one of the two text passages. In both experiments, participants’ structure building ability was measured. Performance was measured on a multiple-choice and a short-answer test covering both detail and conceptual questions.
What did they find?
Findings from the first experiment:
a) Students were more likely to generate detail-level flashcards if not instructed to do otherwise. In addition, the provided flashcards from textbooks were also heavily biased towards detail-level content. So, without any further instruction and if left to their own devices student will be mainly exposed to or generating flashcards that contain definitions or simple facts. Prompting students to generate conceptual-level flashcards was successful to engage them to create those flashcards, but the authors also mention that they only asked students to generate a few conceptual-level flashcards – making the difference between the different study groups less extreme.
b) No difference was found between the four study groups in relation to their test performance on either test. The authors explain that this could be due to the abovementioned little difference between the three flashcard conditions which all were more biased towards detail-level content. In addition, they acknowledge that even participants in the free study condition may have been using strategies similar to the other study groups – making that group more similar to the others.
c) In this experiment, no benefit was found of students generating their own flashcards. However, a significant difference was found in regard to study time: Participants in both self-generated-flashcards conditions studied for longer (approx. 24 minutes) than participants in the provided-flashcards and free study conditions (approx. 15 minutes). Thus, generating flashcards took them longer to do without an effect on performance. However, it is important to keep the just mentioned limitations in mind before jumping to conclusions. Furthermore, despite the fact that no differences were found between the four study groups, the authors found an overall positive relationship between the number of conceptual-level flashcards generated and test performance: More conceptual-level flashcards was associated with better performance on both tests.
In the second experiment all participants were provided with flashcards (either conceptual-level or detail-level ones). While there was no difference between the two conditions on the multiple-choice test, they found an advantage in short-answer performance for participants in the conceptual-level flashcard condition. Interestingly, the benefit of conceptual-level flashcards was moderated by structure building ability: Particularly participants with low structure building ability benefitted from conceptual-level flashcards whereas for participants with high structure building abilities it did not matter whether conceptual versus detail-level flashcards were used.
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Conclusion
Students note flashcard as a go-to study strategy, but they tend to generate flashcards that are more focused on definitions and isolated facts instead of integrating knowledge and concepts. Even flashcards provided by textbook publishers are heavily biased towards detail-level content. However, studying with conceptual-level flashcards is associated with better test performance and leads to better performance on a test that requires to formulate answers (e.g., short-answer questions). Teaching students to engage in generating more conceptual-level flashcards by, for example, providing them with examples of such flashcards as a first study batch could be valuable approach.
References
(1) Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2012). How and when do students use flashcards?. Memory, 20(6), 568-579.
(2) Lin, C., McDaniel, M. A., & Miyatsu, T. (2018). Effects of flashcards on learning authentic materials: The role of detailed versus conceptual flashcards and individual differences in structure-building ability. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7(4), 529-539.
