Language Acquisition Theory

Micro Decks, a Theory on Language Acquisition, by Daniel Ricks

A micro deck is a very small deck. When using flashcards, decks most likely range from between 10 and 100 cards. The student then goes through the cards until they are all memorized, and then reviews them later. The "Ultimate Study" program greatly facilitates this form of study by allowing for an unlimited number of decks and by moving cards from one deck to another depending on whether or not the student answered the question correctly.

Even with "Ultimate Study" however, the student would be discouraged from having decks too small or from switching from deck to deck to frequently, because it requires added time and focus on the student's part to do so. More specifically the student would have to closely monitor the number of cards within each deck if he wanted to switch decks when certain benchmarks were hit in any of the decks and then manually tell the program that he or she would like to study that deck. For traditional study, this is not an issue at all, because the the size of the decks that the student is working through are big enough that the time it takes to say he or she would like to study it is insignificant, and the student generally completes the deck before moving to another, and doesn't monitor the other decks at all while studying any specific deck.

With a few modifications, however, "Ultimate Study" would allow for the use of "micro decks". By entering benchmarks for each deck, the software could automatically move from one deck to another whenever a benchmark is reached. This removes the task of monitoring the deck sizes by the student as well as eliminating the need for the student to switch from one deck to another. This allows for the decks to have very low benchmarks and become very small, micro decks.

When using flashcards to memorize a term, that term is first moved from outside of the student's knowledge base to his or her short-term memory, and then from the student's short-term memory to his or her long term memory. This transition is gradual and the more a student reviews a card, the deeper the term is set into the memory of the student. One difficulty of using the traditional method of flashcards is that, because the decks are generally larger, it takes time for a term to even enter into the student's short term memory. What frequently happens is that, even with a deck as small as ten cards, by the time you see a card the second time, you have already forgotten what it was. When you do get it right and it moves to the next deck, you will likely forget what that card was by the time you see it again. In short, because too much time transpires before terms are reviewed in the initial stages of study, it requires more time to memorize the card. When you see a term, it goes into your short-term memory, but if your short-term memory lasts only a few seconds at the beginning, you will forget it. Because flashcards are repetitive, constantly forgetting terms at the initial stages of study can cause the student to be fatigued.

Micro decks allows study to be targeted on the short term memory of the student. Suppose the benchmarks are set as follows:

Deck 1; 1 Card

Deck 2; 2 Cards

Deck 3; 4 Cards

Deck 4; 8 Cards

Deck 5; 16 Cards

Deck 6; 32 Cards

Deck 7; 64 Cards

Deck 8; 128 Cards

Deck 9; 256 Cards

Deck 10; 512 Cards

Deck 11; 1024 Cards

Deck 12; 2048 Cards

Deck 13; 4096 Cards

In the preceding example, the benchmarks begin at 1 for the first deck, which is doubled in the second deck and so on. When a new term is introduced to deck one, the student will review that term until it is correctly recognized and is moved to deck two. The term has now sprouted in the student's short-term memory, but if it is not reviewed, then it can easily be forgotten within a few seconds. Deck two, however is also a micro deck, having a bench mark of only two cards. Because deck two's benchmark won't be reached until it has two cards, the software will automatically fill deck one with a card from the "to learn" deck. This card will be reviewed and placed into deck two as well. Deck two now has two cards in it, it's benchmark is reached, so the program automatically switches to deck two. Because there are only two cards, the student will review a card that should still be in his or her short-term memory. As the term progresses through the decks it is also moving deeper into the student's memory and the interval between seeing a term and reviewing it grows longer. In this manner, the term makes a very smooth transition from outside the students knowledge base to his or her long term memory.

If a student notices that that he is incorrectly answering a number of cards when they reach a certain deck, this indicates that two much time is passing before the card is reviewed and that means that the benchmark on the deck is set too high. The student can remedy this by lowering the benchmark on the deck, thereby shortening the review interval to within the students memory retention.

This is where the focus of the discussion shifts from micro decks to accuracy ratios.

If the program monitors how often a student answered cards from any given deck correctly, the accuracy ratio could be recorded next to the deck for the student to see. Let's say the student wants to have a minimum accuracy of 70% for any given deck, then once he sees that his accuracy dips below 70% he can decrease the size of the deck his or her accuracy returns to a healthy level. This way, the student can adjust the program to match his or her own personally ability to retain and memorize information.

To take this concept one step further it would be nice if the student was able to set accuracy benchmarks as well. For example, the student could set an accuracy benchmark of no less that 70% on a deck. If the accuracy of that deck fell below the benchmark, the program would automatically lower the benchmark on the deck, thereby shortening the review interval and increasing the accuracy ratio.

What would also be nice would be the ability to set a maximum accuracy limit. Let's say the student sets a maximum accuracy limit of 97%, but is answering the questions with an accuracy of 98%, the program would then increase the size of the deck until the student's accuracy rate was back below 97%. This step decreases the occurrence of unnecessarily reviewing terms that are already memorized sufficiently for that deck. Reviewing terms that are not in need of review also wastes time. By setting a maximum accuracy limit, time will not be wasted by endlessly reviewing terms that are already solidly placed in the memory of the student. The benchmarks would flux and change as the software adapted to and "learned" the students ability to memorize new terms.

I believe that the use of micro decks and accuracy ratios would greatly speed up the memorization process, thereby increasing the rate of language acquisition!!!