How to create effective Anki cards for exercises with interdependent questions?

[Hadran]

Hello,
I am studying mathematics and I often work with exercises where each question depends on the answer to the previous one.

In Anki, I want to turn these exercises into flashcards, but I’m not sure what is the best approach:

• Should I split them into independent cards and replace intermediate results with given values?

• Or should I keep the whole exercise in one card (possibly using cloze deletions for each step)?

• Are there any recommended practices for handling this type of “linked question” problem?

My goal is to keep cards short enough for daily review, but still train myself on the logical chain of reasoning in such exercises.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[Ankiuser7]

Hi, me personally I would go for the cloze deletion since they are easy to review and create.

[Hadran]

Ok but with cloze deletion can I guarantee the order of appearance of the cards? For instance lets say that I have an exercise with interdependent questions, will Anki know that its is pointless to show question 2 first if I have not seen question 1 before? Will cloze deletion automatically show questions 1,2…in a correct order? Or can it skip questions?

[Eltaurus]

You can set up the cloze cards to show in order when they are first learned in the “Display Order” section of deck settings. But after they are learned, they will start appearing according to their review intervals. The whole point of a spaced repetition system is to track which cards you forget more often and to show them more frequently. So any initially established order dissolves rather quickly.

You might want to check out the technique called incremental reading. Since it involves making flashcards out of large blocks of structured information, it might have some applicability to your case. There was an Anki add-on with the same name at some point, although I’m not sure if it is in a working state currently.