Group/Whole Class Reviews

Anki Suggestions
1

I am 10-year teacher and a 12-year avid user of Anki. For a while now I’ve believed that spaced retrieval practice needs to find more of a foothold in our classrooms. Anki is the purest form of srs and so I’d like to see this implemented here.

The idea is this:

  • Have decks that are common to the class and are synced to a “group/whole class” account.

  • Each class period, the students have 5-10 seconds to respond as a group to each card on their own devices. If they take too long to respond, the cards continue, but the non-responses are marked as “again”.

  • To determine review schedule for the class, the mean score of all responses is taken as the group response.

  • Ideally, individual review schedules would also be generated and synced, so that responses during group review affected individual review schedules, and vice-versa.

In theory, this would facilitate spaced retrieval practice at the classroom level, with comparative results. If anyone would like to explore this further with me, I would be happy to partner with you in developing an add-on, etc. and providing a test environment that would make this possible.

Thank you,

Grant

2

The magic of Anki relies on meaningful active recall, so if a student just wants to get their homework over and done with then they will not reap the benefits of Anki. They would be encouraged to select ‘Easy’ to not see the cards again, hence further weakening their recollection of them, pushing them more and more to keep saying the cards are fine when in fact they are not.

How old are your students, and do they understand the importance of learning? If so then I believe they would benefit the most from individual Anki timetabling, and the possible biggest benefit from a ‘class account’ would be being able to see which topics/cards your students are struggling with the most - though tests could also reveal this.

Anki should be a complement to learning and not the main focus, remembering facts on their own is useless if you have not had enough practice to master their application!