Abstract:

Long-term memory is essential to have a solid knowledge basis on which build new concepts. However, students often study the material in bulk and on an immediate basis, focusing only on passing the evaluation tests. The "forgetting curve," developed by the German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885, shows that the loss of retention over time has an exponential decay when no effort is made to review the information. If what is learned is reviewed at the appropriate time and using active learning tools that force you to react to questions or triggers, the forgetting rate is reduced, making the time needed between each review increasingly longer, until the information is finally fixed in the long-term memory.

This methodology that flattens the forgetting curve through Spaced Repetition has been successfully used in the study of foreign languages due to its high performance. The objective of the present project is to transfer the Spaced Repetition System to STEM studies, with the purpose of consolidating concepts that are the basis of more complex knowledge and that are often forgotten by students by the time they reach the last years of their undergraduate studies.

Spaced Repetition is commonly performed by specialized software using SM (SuperMemo) algorithms, first developed in 1987 by Piotr Woźniak based on the forgetting curve and spaced repetition, and which continue being updated today. For this particular project we use Anki, a free and open source software based on the SM2 algorithm. It works on the basis of cards created using HTML, which can include text, images, sounds, videos and LaTeX equations. The type of activity contained in the card can be of many different types, but always looking for a proactive response from the student, rather than a mere reading, to properly reinforce the knowledge. Depending on the difficulty the student had to remember the answer, the software calculates how much time has to pass until the question is displayed again, so that the probability of correctly remembering the concept studied is not lower than a certain threshold, according to the forgetting curve, thus making the long-term retention increasingly higher.

Acknowledgement:
This project has received funding from the University of Zaragoza under the programme “Proyectos de Innovación: Docencia, Tecnología, Orientación, Social y Transferencia” (Innovation Projects: Teaching, Technology, Guidance, Social and Transfer) with reference number PIIDUZ_21_125.

Keywords:

Spaced repetition, matlab, anki, teaching innovation, learning tool.