About these notes

Hi! I’m Andy Matuschak. You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

👋 Andy (email, Twitter, main personal site)

PS: My work is made possible by a crowd-funded research grant from my Patreon community. You can become a member to support future work, and to read patron-only updates and previews of upcoming projects.

PS: Many people ask, so I’ll just note here: no, I haven’t made this system available for others to use. It’s still an early research environment, and Premature scaling can stunt system iteration.

Important attributes of good spaced repetition memory prompts

This note collects ideas about how to encode knowledge into Spaced repetition memory system prompts, both to support memory of facts but also to foster richer understanding (Spaced repetition memory systems can be used to develop conceptual understanding).

See How to write good prompts (2020) for a published manuscript on this topic.

Basic attributes of prompt-writing:

• Spaced repetition memory prompts should be concise
• Spaced repetition memory prompts should usually focus on one atomic unit
• Spaced repetition memory prompts should encode ideas from multiple angles
  • Spaced repetition memory prompts should connect and relate ideas
• Spaced repetition memory prompts should unambiguously produce a specific answer
  • Prompts must make clear what “shape” of answer they expect
• Spaced repetition memory prompts should ensure reviewers must retrieve answers from memory
  • Avoid yes-no spaced repetition memory prompts
• Spaced repetition memory prompts should be written to discourage shallow “pattern matching”
• Beware set\/enumeration SRS prompts
• Cloze deletion prompts seem to produce less understanding than question-answer pairs in spaced repetition memory systems
• Expert response heuristic, after Issa Rice

“Covering” material:

• Avoid orphan spaced repetition memory prompts

Meta / mental models:

• A pattern language of prompt-writing
• Rule of thumb: write more spaced repetition prompts than seems natural
• Spaced repetition prompt design is about designing tasks for your future self

Related: The “reflected essay” metaphor for the goal for the mnemonic medium

References

Matuschak, A. (2020). How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding. https://andymatuschak.org/prompts

See section Improving the mnemonic medium: making better cards in How can we develop transformative tools for thought? and Nielsen (2018, 2019).

Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics - Michael Nielsen

Piotr Wozniak - Effective learning - Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

Soren Bjornstad’s patterns

Fernando Boretti: Effective Spaced Repetition