From one moment to the next, learning with flashcards can go from “wow, I’m being so productive!” to “wow, why am I so chaotic? I am overwhelmed.” I certainly experienced this when I tried to memorize 3000 Chinese characters - and today I want to share insights that helped me - and hundreds of other students - overcome flashcard issues.
Whether you're an aspiring medical professional, a machine learning researcher, or a dedicated language learner, it's essential to find effective ways to tackle complex subjects.
Flashcards are a proven method to enhance learning, memory retention, and mastery - and a big part of how I successfully managed to master Mandarin.
Over 67% of students nowadays use flashcards, according to thisstudy. But how can you make flashcards truly effective, especially when dealing with intricate concepts?
In this guide, I'll share ten rules for creating powerful flashcards that will help you conquer complex subjects and stay ahead of the curve. By understanding and implementing these rules, you'll be better equipped to overcome challenges and achieve the success you've been striving for.
Say goodbye to stress and frustration, and hello to a more fun and effective learning experience.
The 10 rules to make great flashcards1. Focus on One Idea per card2. Connect with the Context3. Be Precise4. Challenge yourself (use higher-order thinking)5. Use cloze deletions, image occlusion and mind map occlusions6. Visualize7. Personalize8. Use Mnemonics9. Be Consistent10. Make it NeatTips to optimize your flashcard practiceLearn before you memorizeMake your own cardsReview using spaced repetitionVary your Retrieval PracticeConclusionRead More
The 10 rules to make great flashcards
Let's explore these rules to create flashcards that will help you master complex subjects and reach your full potential. I’ve added a “bad” and a “good” example for each rule to help you recognize and implement these rules in practice.
1. Focus on One Idea per card
One of the key principles of effective flashcards is to keep them simple and concise. A single flashcard should focus on a single idea.
When you write lots of facts on a single card, it’s easy to think that you got a right even if you remembered only a few items: Your brain easily deludes you into thinking that you know the matter.
Cluttering your cards with multiple ideas can furthermore lead to confusion and hamper your ability to remember the core concept.
By dedicating each card to a single idea, you're encouraging your brain to make strong associations between the cue and the related information. This targeted approach results in better understanding and retention of complex subjects.
Adhering to the minimum information principle ensures that your brain processes the card consistently (more on that later).
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
2. Connect with the Context
Learning isolated facts is a bad idea. It’s also very difficult to make isolated facts stick, so they require more repetitions to master, which can quickly become dull and tedious.
By contrast, if you know how a card fits into the bigger picture, the piece of knowledge you’re learning becomes useful and starts to make sense, which makes it easier to remember.
So do not create flashcards in a vacuum, but know why you are creating this specific flashcard, and how it connects with other stuff you’ve already learned.
However, only include highly relevant context! Your flashcards are for testing, not for summarizing (which can be done using other effective study techniques like mind mapping).
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
3. Be Precise
Flashcard prompts should be precise. There should be only one clear answer.
If a question is vague, not only will it make it harder to know which answer we’re looking for, but it will also be much harder for you to judge whether you got a flashcard correct or not. Again, that could result in the self-delusion mentioned in 1.
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
4. Challenge yourself (use higher-order thinking)
It should take your brain a bit of effort to come up with the right answer. This is when the testing effect (also called active recall) is most effective.
If the answer is trivial (or you give it away in your question), you may get the flashcard correct easily, but the actual learning effect is barely there (which makes these kinds of flashcards comparable to more passive methods like re-reading).
Active recall requires active work, so be creative when you create flashcards, and make your brain put effort into it. The best way to do that is by activating higher-order thinking as displayed in Bloom’s Taxonomy: viewing the material from different angles and analyzing how it relates to other concepts.
For example, asking for a simple definition is lower-order thinking and of limited use. But asking for a hypothetical scenario about a process you’re studying requires higher-order thinking, and makes for a great flashcard.
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
5. Use cloze deletions, image occlusion and mind map occlusions
A great way of connecting your flashcards with the context (see #2), is by simply taking the context, and ‘blurring out’ the bit you want to remember.
This can be done for many forms of information. And using the right software (like our study app Traverse), it is extremely fast to create such flashcards:
For textual information, we can create a cloze deletion:
For images, we can create an image occlusion:
And for diagrams, concept maps or mind maps we can create a mind map occlusion:
As you can see, there are many different ways to go about this. Especially image and mind map occlusions are extremely effective, as we’ll discover in the next rule:
6. Visualize
The visual cortex is one of the oldest and most powerful parts of the brain, and it’s well-known that visual information is remembered significantly better than textual information (the Pictorial Superiority Effect).
Furthermore, drawing out a concept visually (whether freehand or by creating a mind map) helps you think about how ideas are connected together. This makes the process of creating visually engaging flashcards a very effective learning activity in itself.
Even if you have to use text, you can add visual elements like color coding to see at a glance which things matter and how they relate to each other.
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
7. Personalize
Just like we remember visual information better, us humans are extremely good at information that related to the most interesting topic in the world: ourselves.
So instead of learning a random piece of information, make that information immediately relevant by connecting it to yourself. This can be a real connection, but an imagined connection can work equally well (like in the example below) - and is definitely more fun!
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
8. Use Mnemonics
Sometimes, you just need to memorize a lot of information that does not have a lot of inherent meaning (note that this is the exception! Most things we learn are meaningful). In that case, you can add artificial meaning to the information by using Mnemonics.
For example, by taking the first letters of a list of items you have to learn, and coming up with a meaningful sentence with the same first letters.
The rule for mnemonics is: the more absurd, weird, disgusting or funny, the easier it is to remember!
Let’s have a look at an example from electronic engineering:
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
9. Be Consistent
Flashcard prompts should yield consistent answers, lighting the same “lightbulbs” in your brain every time you review them.
Otherwise, you may fall victim to “memory interference”, where learning a new piece of information makes you forget older, similar but identical information.
By using consistent phrasing across your flashcards, you will know which answer you’re trying to recall, and are less likely to mix things up (for example, when you have to remember both the meaning as well as the etymology of a word, unclear phrasing could make it easy to mix-up the two).
Example (Left - Bad, Right - Good):
10. Make it Neat
Eventually, you will end up learning what’s on your flashcards. That’s why you want to make sure that your flashcards are organized in a way that makes logical sense to you, reflecting what’s going on in your mind.
Making your cards neat will take some extra time when creating them, but the increased understanding will save you a lot of time afterwards, and you’ll require fewer repetitions to master the flashcard.
Another way to do this, is to refine your flashcards on every review. You start with a flashcard that’s a bit messy, but during the time between reviews your brain works hard to make sense of it. When you review the flashcard again, you can use your improved understanding to “clean up” the flashcard.
Tips to optimize your flashcard practice
Now that you have awesome and effective flashcards, it’s time to review them!
Just like creating flashcards, there are good ways and bad ways to review your flashcards. Here are some tips to make sure that your retrieval practice is as effective as possible:
Learn before you memorize
If you stick to the 8 rules above, chances are that you’ve already learned a great dealbefore you even do a review. And that is exactly the point: you cannot memorize what you haven’t understood yet. Actually, you could, but it takes a lot of effort and results in a bunch of isolated facts in your brain (which is not a great way of going into an exam with confidence).
Using encoding techniques like mind mapping can help you deeply grasp topics, and save you a lot of time and tedious reviews later on.
Make your own cards
For the same reason, you should always strive to create your own flashcards. Starting out with a deck of flashcards which someone else created for you (no matter how well-versed that person is in the topic at hand) will make it hard for you to connect the dots, and you’re likely facing a lot of tedious reviews (what we call ‘flashcard hell’).
Shared decks are a great supplementary source and you can get inspired by how others encoded the information, but do not rely on them as your primary source of flashcards.
Review using spaced repetition
Spaced repetition is a way of setting the optimal schedule for reviewing your flashcards. The trick is to review just at the moment you’re about to forget.
If you’re planning to incorporate spaced repetition in your study process, be sure to check out our guide to master not memorize using spaced repetition.
Vary your Retrieval Practice
Now you have well-crafted flashcards - and can practice them with spaced repetition in "dead time," like waiting in queues or using public transport.
But flashcard reviews shouldn’t be your only way of learning. In fact, don't feel obligated to clear your flashcard review queue all the time; instead, use focused study time for higher-return activities like rewriting flashcards or creating new practice problems.
Retrieval practice isn't limited to flashcards. Create and revisit mind maps, use the Feynman technique, elaborative interrogation, and interleaving for a more varied practice. No single technique is perfect, but combining them helps you view the material from different perspectives, leading to mastery and better test performance.
Conclusion
Flashcards are a great way to learn if used correctly. With the 10 rules above, you’ll be able to create flashcards that are effective and fun, helping you stay motivated on your way to academic success.
Be sure to master not memorize, setting up a varied retrieval practice, and you’ll be ahead of 90% of your peers.
Read More
Resources
