Learning facts and then quickly forgetting them–whether it’s the name of the person you’ve just met, or the name of the compound you’ve just memorized for your chem test tomorrow–hardly qualifies as learning if you can’t recall what you’ve “learned” the next day, or even the next minute! You may wonder why you are forgetting things so quickly after you’ve spent hours studying them. It’s because you aren’t being a smart learner. Stop learning like a goldfish and read on!

We all have our own learning and study habits. Unfortunately, the study habits we use are neither effective nor efficient, and we end up quickly forgetting the things we just spent hours studying. Cramming the night before a test, or studying one thing for an hour until you know it and then never coming back to it, are two learning techniques that many of us use, but that do not lead to long-term retention. If you are serious about improving how you learn, it is necessary to develop good learning habits. It’s time to stop wasting time studying ineffectively and read this blog to understand how remembering something for a long time depends on how you learned it in the first place.

What makes a good learner?

A good learner is one who learns:

(1) Effectively: To remember learned material for a long time

(2) Efficiently: To not waste time learning material (s)he already knows.

Brainscape helps you learn both effectively and efficiently. Effective learners take time to look back on what they know and what they don’t know and then study those concepts accordingly, which makes an Efficient learner.

Brainscape is Effective

The ability to asses how well you know certain concepts is referred to as metacognition and is central to how Brainscape helps you learn more while studying less. Improving your metacognition will improve the effectiveness of your learning. When you answer Brainscape’s question: “How well did you know this?” you are using metacognition. The more times you answer that question the more you use metacognition, and the more your ability to self-assess improves.

In addition to improving metacognition, there are different ways of studying that are more effective than others. Active Recall, or mentally retrieving the answer, is a more effective method of studying than passively reviewing information or choosing an answer from a list (like in multiple choice). Brainscape is organized in decks of electronic study cards because it demands active recall, which significantly increases your ability to retain the information.

Brainscape is Efficient

While using flashcards is already an improvement when compared to the ineffective study methods I mentioned above, it would not be the most efficient method if you looked at all the flashcards in a deck the same number of times. There are always some you know very well and some you don’t know at all. The problem is that they show up the same number of times in a deck, no matter how well you know them. Brainscape’s Confidence Based Repetition (CBR) algorithm uses your answer to “How well did you know this?” (your confidence level) to determine when to revisit that flashcard next. By controlling when both old and new flashcards come up in the deck, Brainscape maximizes the number of flashcards you are able to learn, thus making it a tool that makes you a more effective and efficient learner: a better learner.