by ohthatpatrick Tue Jun 18, 2019 1:19 pm
Great questions.
My answers will be shamefully wishy-washy:
- they could be used at any time. I probably wouldn't recommend that most people try to learn Games via flashcards-only, so in that sense I wouldn't suggest pre-gaming these flashcards before taking a course / reading a strategy guide.
- Ideally, flashcards would be something students create themselves, in real time, as they're reading a chapter / doing an Interact lesson / reviewing some LSAT problems they just attempted.
The point of flashcards is to lock down whatever thing we just learned / we just struggled with.
There's something called "the Fluency Illusion", which basically means that we tend to overestimate how well we've digested the explanation to whatever we just struggled with. We usually understand it in the moment but then struggle with it again the next time we see it.
The solution is flashcards and redo appointments.
For something that is specific / short enough to be reduced to a flashcard quiz, that's an ideal format.
If the task we struggled with is longer-form (an RC passage, an entire game, a really long argument), then we need to just set redo appointments (pick an arbitrary date 5 - 20 days later and assign yourself a calendar reminder to redo whatever thing you were just working on.
We created these flashcards so that people could be inspired to create their own / use ours in the meantime.
In terms of the order in which you do them, it normally makes sense to have a learning progression from easier to harder, so you could try working on each subset before you move to the next one.
They're organized as
1. Basic Skills
2. Test Knowledge and Review
3. Think Like a Pro
4. Hard even for a 180
But it's also fine to just put it all together into one big deck. The philosophy of doing flashcards is to look at them at least 3 days a week, and when a card starts to feel like an easy, automatic win, then remove it from the deck.
The goal is to prune out what we've already learned so that we're getting more frequent exposure to the remaining cards, which are apparently still challenging.
There are not explanations anywhere. If you don't understand some of them, you might not have covered the applicable content in your course materials yet. Or, they might just be confusing, in which case ask away on the forum.
Good luck!