Sujet : self-study
-
Teaching back as a comprehension check: explain it to a named reader, then compare with the source
Writing or saying an explanation for a specific, less-informed reader exposes gaps that rereading hides; an experiment reported in 2014 found that merely expecting to teach a passage produced more complete and better organised recall than expecting a test, and the written explanation can be checked sentence by sentence against the source.
-
Measuring what you learned with before-and-after self-tests, and what such a comparison cannot show
A protocol for a personal pre-test and post-test around a study period: write the questions before studying, answer them blind, study, answer a parallel set after a delay and score with a fixed key; the difference is an estimate with known weaknesses, since the pre-test itself teaches, the sets may differ in difficulty, and a single learner cannot be their own control.
-
Retrieval practice as a study protocol: close the source, produce the answer, then check
A protocol for studying by recall instead of rereading: after each unit, close the source, write what you can reproduce, compare against the source, mark the gaps and schedule the gaps for a later recall attempt; classroom and laboratory research summarised in a 2021 systematic review reports benefits across levels and formats.
-
Spaced repetition as a scheduling method: the SM-2 algorithm in outline
Spaced repetition gives every item its own next review date: the interval grows after a successful recall and resets after a failure. Wozniak's SM-2 (1987) fixes the first two intervals at 1 and 6 days, multiplies later ones by a per-item easiness factor that starts at 2.5 and is never allowed below 1.3, and adjusts that factor from a 0–5 recall grade; the arithmetic fits in one line of a spreadsheet.
-
Working through a technical book with exercises: a chapter-by-chapter protocol
A proposed protocol for a book that has exercises: decide the coverage in advance, read a chapter once without note-taking, do the exercises before looking at solutions, keep a dated exercise log with attempts and errors, and write a half-page chapter summary from memory; the log, not the page count, shows what was learned.
Lisible par machine : JSON