Flash Cards: Reducing Your Study Time

This is Kevin Patton with another tip for reducing your study time. This time we'll
be talking about flash cards. Let's start with the basics. First of all, what in the
world is a flash card or study card? Well, you probably used these in elementary school
to learn your multiplication facts or maybe you use them in a Spanish course to learn
all those new Spanish vocabulary words. It's basically just a card with the term on it
that you've never seen before, like this one: carbaminohemoglobin. So you look at that,
you puzzle over little bit, and make a stab at what that might mean. Then you flip over
the card to see if you're right or not. The trick here is not to really fret about it.
What you want to do is just look at them over and over and over. The whole idea of a flash
card is that you carry these around with you and practice, practice, practice, without
sweating it. And before you know it, once you've seen this card on carbaminohemoglobin
about 10 times, you'll know it! Without any kind of frustration and in a quicker time
than you might imagine. Now this gets to something that we educators like to call the learning
pyramid. The learning pyramid sort of maps out how we learn things. And it all starts
at the bottom with a good foundation in remembering the basic facts. So using flashcards is gonna
help us build that foundation of basic facts by basically memorizing them and making them
part of our own working vocabulary. They're not necessarily the best thing for learning
the higher levels of thinking like understanding and applying and analyzing and evaluating
and creating and so on. But they do provide us that foundation. So flashcards are not
gonna be your only study tool but they're a good way to started in a new topic. Now
let's learn how we really get our flashcards. First of all, you can make them yourself.
Another thing is you can use published study cards on the topic that you're studying. I
recommend that you use a combination of both. Now if you're gonna make them, you want to
use 3 x 5 index cards or paper of a similar size. You can use something larger or smaller
but I think the 3 x 5 size is really handy to use: it's easy to carry around and it fits
enough information that makes this technique very usable. You can also use your computer
to generate flashcards. For example, software that you already have, like a word processor,
were you can build a table, print out the table, and then cut out the the cards. Or
you can use a spreadsheet program for the same thing. There's also a lot of different
online resources for study cards. Two of them I've listed here: the Anki system and also
Study Stack. Both of these are online versions of of study cards where you would be building
your study cards and then reviewing them online. Some of them you can also print them out and
carry them with you. Another thing about these online sources is that you can share your
stack of study cards with another student and, likewise, you can use study cards that
were made by another student. But I do want to warn you: if you're gonna do that, please
verify the accuracy of them. Double check them for the correctness. Not only your own
study cards but those from other people. Because you really don't want to be learning the wrong
facts. There are some more advanced ways to use study cards the you might want to develop.
For example, you might want to develop a style where you use color coding or various symbols
to represent different kinds of concepts or different subcategories of the facts that
your learning. Let's take a look at an example. Hear's our carbaminohemoglobin card again.
But this time a color code has been added where different parts of the term have been
given different colors: carbon in blue, amino in green, hemoglobin in red. And this highlights
different essential pieces of that description or definition. Notice how the author of this
card has also added a pronunciation guide under the term which might be useful to you
especially with the long term like carbaminohemoglobin. Notice also at the bottom of the card that
this person has added some chapter references to show where this term or where this concept
is discussed in the textbook. Over time, you might be wanting to add additional facts such
as in this case: a brief description of what that substance actually looks like. Another
advanced technique would be to use pictures. For example, let's say you need to learn where
the frontal bone is or what it looks like. One option would be to draw a little sketch
of the frontal bone because this is really a visual concept and that might be better
for you than writing out a verbal description. But if you're drawing is about as good as
mine, you'll want to maybe use a drawing from somewhere else and just tape it or paste it
to your card and then highlight the part you need. This picture I got from Wikimedia Commons.
There is a lot of online resources where you can get copyright free images that you could
print out and use for your study cards. You might also want to consider photocopying your
workbook, or lab manual, or textbook. And there might be other sources that your instructor
might provide for building your own set of visual study cards. Another advanced system
would be using the Leitner system, named after its developer who was a German science writer.
And he said you should have a series of boxes where you stack up your study cards. And these
boxes you would look at it varying frequencies. For example, in your first box, you might
carry that with you. The next one, you might look at that twice a day. The the next one,
once a day. The one after that, every other day. You might have another stack you look
at every week. And so what you're going to do is take a card and look at it and, if you
answer correctly, you're gonna move it to a less frequently used box. If you get it
right again when it's in that less frequently use box, then you move it to an even less
frequently used box. If you get one wrong then you're going to move them in the other
direction. Your gonna take the incorrectly answered card and move it to a more frequently
use box. And if you get it correct again, or I mean incorrect, again then you move it
to an even more frequently looked at box. This whole system is based on the idea that
you want to review the ones you get wrong more frequently than ones you get right. Which
makes sense, right? You want to focus on the stuff you're having trouble with--and not
the stuff that you're not having trouble with, which you want to review less frequenc.. less
frequently. So I have a system that is an adaptation of the system that Leitner developed,
where you really just carry around that same stack of cards all the time. And if you answered
correctly, then you can move it all away to the back of that stack. So here's carbaminohemoglobin
and by now we have that right, so we're gonna move that all the way to the back. And we're
gonna drop in at the very back of that stack. Now if we get one wrong, what we're going
to do is move that, not all away to the back of the stack, but we're gonna move it somewhere
closer to the front so that we'll see it again more quickly. And we'll have more opportunities
to take a look at it and really get that information down. So let's say the next card is oxyhemoglobin.
We get that one wrong, so instead of moving it to the back, we're gonna move it somewhere
in the middle. And the harder it is, the closer to the front we're gonna move it, so that
we have an earlier opportunity to review it. So is the same as the Leitner system; it's
just a slightly adapted form. Now, getting back to our learning pyramid here, as I said,
all of what we've been doing is really helping us remember those basic facts that can be
the foundation for all the higher levels. But can we use flashcards for getting us up
into the understanding level or the applying level? Yes, I think are some ways of doing
that. Let's take a look at a couple of examples. One would be putting things in order. For
example, you might have some process that has steps that you need to learn in the correct
order. Or maybe you have some structure that you need to know, how the layers go in the
correct order. Or some other structural aspects that have a particular order to them. So here
we have phases of mitosis that we need to learn what the correct order is. And so we're
going to take those cards and just kinda deal them out, in any order. And then we're going
to take a look at them and see. Are they in the correct order? In this case, no. They're
not quite in the correct order. So we're going to rearrange them so they are in the correct
order. And that'll help us learn how to do that, and what order they come in. And when
we're done with that, we're gonna shuffle them up and we're gonna lay them out again
and rearrange them again. After you do that numerous times, it really isn't very difficult.
And before you know it, without even thinking about it, if you've got it down. You know
what order they come in. Yet another way to get to those more advanced levels of thinking
is to relate concepts. For example, let's say you have a stack of cards on blood cells.
So you lay out that title card there: blood cells. And then you find in your stack the
three main kinds of blood cells: the thrombocytes (or platelets), erythrocytes (or red blood
cells), or the leukocytes (which are white blood cells). And then you might find some
other cards in the stack that you can lay out there. And we have oxyhemoglobin and carbaminohemoglobin,
which we're gonna lay on the erythrocyte card because those are both substances that are
found within the erythrocyte and not the other kinds of blood cells. And then we find these
two other cards, granulocytes and agranulocytes, and those are categories of leukocytes. So
you can see we're laying them out in ways that show us relationships among these concepts
or among these terms. So what you want to do is shuffle them up and lay them out there
again and rearrange them. And the next time, you might find slightly different relationships
because there are sometimes more than one kind of relationship among different concepts.
So it's gonna help you explore those relationships and kind of learn what they are. And if you
keep practicing this over and over then, again, you're going to really be learning those relationships.
Not just the basic facts but how they relate to one another. What you might want to do
is, once you get them all laid out, is convert it into a concept map. Now you can do this
by taking a photograph using your cell phone or a digital camera and then printing it out
and reviewing that later. Or maybe just drawing out the concept map. And this way, not only
by drawing out the map are you learning relationships, but when you're going back to review your
information, you're gonna have these concept maps already drawn out to help you reinforce
that information about what those relationships are. So the basic thing is, you want to practice,
practice, practice. And you don't want to fret about them. You just want to carry them
around. And it's gonna be a painless way to learn your basic facts and get yourself moving
on that learning pyramid. If you want to know some more tips for reducing your study time,
go to my blog at theAPstudent.org