How do college students use digital flashcards during self-regulated learning?

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, digital flashcards – that is, computer programmes, smartphone apps, and online services that mimic, and potentially improve upon, the capabilities of traditional paper flashcards – have grown in variety and popularity. Many digital flashcard platforms allow learners to make or use flashcards from a variety of sources and customise the way in which flashcards are used. Yet relatively little is known about why and how students actually use digital flashcards during self-regulated learning, and whether such uses are supported by research from the science of learning. To address these questions, we conducted a large survey of undergraduate students (n = 901) at a major U.S. university. The survey revealed insights into the popularity, acquisition, and usage of digital flashcards, beliefs about how digital flashcards are to be used during self-regulated learning, and differences in uses of paper versus digital flashcards, all of which have implications for the optimisation of student learning. Overall, our results suggest that college students commonly use digital flashcards in a manner that only partially reflects evidence-based learning principles, and as such, the pedagogical potential of digital flashcards remains to be fully realised.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital flashcards
• online learning technologies
• distributed practice
• retrieval practice
• self-regulated learning

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Shanae Wong and Emily Marquez for their assistance with coding survey responses. We are also grateful to Steve Reiss and Noreen Webb for their advice on data analysis procedures. The authors also thank members of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Laboratory at UCLA and Naomi Eisenberger for their thoughtful suggestions and discussions throughout the development of this project. Thanks to John Dunlosky and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Data availability statement

Data and materials for this study are archived at the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/5g4ur/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wissman et al. (2012) did not specify which type (paper or digital) of flashcards students used in their original survey. However, because the default conception of flashcards is often of physical (i.e., paper) ones, we opted to use wording in our questions that would differentiate between the two types.

2 Average total time spent on the survey includes only the times of the participants who answered that they had used digital flashcards before (701) and excludes times that were greater than 2 h (15) for a total of 686 times.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a scholarship from the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program at UCLA and the Kroner Family Endowed Fellowship at UCSD awarded to I.Z.