Every card in the done pile
Aisha is in Year 12 with a Spanish vocabulary quiz on Friday. On Tuesday night she goes through her thirty cards. Each one she gets right goes on a done pile.
By ten the deck is empty and she feels ready. On Friday, a third of the words will not come.
It happens every week, so she makes more cards and starts earlier. She starts to think her memory is the problem.
Right once is not the same as learned
In 2008, Jeffrey Karpicke at Purdue and Henry Roediger at Washington University in St. Louis had students learn 40 Swahili words. For some, a word left the quiz the first time they got it right. For others, every word stayed in the quiz until the end.
Both groups got nearly every word by the end of the session. Both guessed they would remember about half a week later. The feeling of knowing it tonight was real in both groups. It just could not tell them about next week.
Dropped after one right
About 1 in 3
words remembered a week later
Kept in the quiz
About 4 in 5
words remembered a week later
Reading the dropped words again did not help. Only being asked again did.
So Aisha did learn the words on Tuesday. Answering a card once shows you know it tonight. Answering it again on another day is what keeps it until Friday.
Put the right ones back
Keep the done pile. Just make it harder to get into. A right answer earns a pencil tick in the corner, and the card goes back in the deck.
Say the answer out loud or scribble it before you turn the card. A guess you never said does not count.
Why days? Katherine Rawson and John Dunlosky's lab at Kent State tested exactly this in 2018. One right answer on each of three days left students with more than twice as much a week later as three right answers in one night.
If you have ADHD, the ticks give you a finish line you can see. Every card with a tick is progress, even on a short night.
Three ticks by Friday
On Tuesday Aisha went through the deck once and ticked what she knew. On Wednesday she did it again, and four of the ticked words had already gone. They went back in with no new tick.
That felt bad for a second. Then she saw it differently: she had found those four on Wednesday, not in the middle of the quiz.
By Thursday most cards had two ticks and a few had three. Those went on the done pile, and every card in it had earned its place.
Tonight, pick up last night's done pile and shuffle it back into the deck. Go through it once with a pencil in your hand. That is about ten minutes.
Plan2Ace
A pencil and a deck are enough. Plan2Ace brings the cards back for you.
Flashcards in Plan2Ace come back when they are due, so a card you knew on Tuesday still gets asked again later. Prefer paper? The ticks are the point.
A few more questions
What if I get a card wrong after it has two ticks?
Keep the ticks. The card goes back in the deck and needs one more right answer on another day. A miss now is one you will not meet in the exam.
Does this work for more than vocabulary?
The study used word pairs, so that is where the evidence is strongest. Any fact with one clear answer fits on a card the same way: a definition, a date, a formula.
How many cards should one deck have?
Few enough to go through in one sitting. If a night's round takes longer than about fifteen minutes, split the deck in two and do one each night.
Got ten minutes?
Shuffle the done pile back in and go through the deck once with a pencil. Or let Plan2Ace bring the cards back. Free to start.
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