Application of Mnemosyne for learning procedural information

[prf.kish...@gmail.com]

Hello there,

I'm a guy who is amazingly impressed by the power of spaced repetition. But I'm really surprised to see that spaced repetition software like Mnemosyne, Anki, Supermemo are mostly to memorize the factual information (usually languages, Biological terms). I don't understand why the spaced repetition isn't being exploited for procedural information (for like Highschool to College level Physics and Math). I feel it can be applied to sciences. After all Procedures & Logics also need to be remembered. The "Why" part of the procedures can also be fed to our brain using spaced repetition. But I cannot be the first guy to think this way. Somebody must have tried this out. I've been searching for more information on the same for couple of days now.

But I couldn't find any information on this. Can any one here point me out to resources (blog posts, books, research papers etc) on such trials. If you have any opinions or views, kindly share them. I'm really enthusiastic.

[Scott Youngman]

Can you give an example of a card or series of cards to test procedure? Thanks.

[George Wade]

As a start you could put a procedure into a video clip. Then the video or a link to it in the Answer pane of a Q & A pair.

But people have many different ways of learning a procedure.

George

[KishoreKumar Bairi]

I was thinking more in the lines of multiple choice questions like in khanacademy-exercises  or SAT physics or Math Question. Everytime the question is repeated, the numbers in the problem change which avoids getting away with answer memorized. If the answer is wrong, then it means he didn't learn the procedure correctly. This is a rough overview. I'll have to sit down and think more about it. 

Before me start thinking, I want to see if something like this done by others.

[Oisín]

I used Mnemosyne to help practice some pieces for a piano exam with good results. The natural ability of the SRS to quickly prioritise the sections that caused me most difficulty meant that my time was spent more efficiently than before.
I'd like to try that experiment again, although it would be perfect for a tablet, with scanned images rather than simply "Fugue in A, bars 30-32" and having to flip pages for each card :)

Regarding the use of SRS for understanding and learning concepts and theories, that's a bit patchier. Many years ago I tried with Pauker to study my compiler construction notes, but my approach was very inefficient and it didn't work as well as I hoped - my normal routine of "do nothing, then cram-read and use some mnemonics for the hard bits, 2 days before the exam" would have been more productive, perhaps.

However, other people have developed and successfully used techniques for doing this kind of learning much more efficiently.
One example is cloze deletion, which is very powerful, especially when supported by the SRS program. I used this to help learn some Rubik's cube algorithms, although it's still too difficult and slow... I might try that again using a mnemonic approach.

There's some interesting ideas on the Supermemo page, where incremental reading and cloze deletion are combined to help learn all sorts of stuff:
http://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm

I've not tried that, because it seems like perhaps a little overkill, and frankly I'm just too lazy :)

Oisín

[Gnome]

Its not implemented yet, but I have submitted an idea for a plugin:

http://mnemosyne.uservoice.com/forums/164265-general/suggestions/2920603-random-calculation-assignment-plugin 

Vote for it if you like it.