Frame: the problem and its names
This file states the flashcard problem in one sentence. It then gives the names that research and practice use for it, and what this review leaves to other reviews.
The problem in one sentence
Decide how a set of prompts for spaced review is written and kept, so that reviewing it makes the learner retain and use what it holds.
Terms used in this review
- A card is one prompt and its answer, reviewed apart from the text it came from.
- A deck is a set of cards reviewed together.
- A note is the record from which a tool makes one or more cards (Anki 2026a).
- Formulation is how the prompt and the answer are worded and what each holds.
- Granularity is how much one card holds: one fact, or several.
- A ready-made deck (premade, shared) is written by someone other than the learner; a learner-made deck is written by the learner.
- Dropping is setting a card aside once the learner thinks it is known (Kornell 2008).
- A leech is a card the learner keeps failing; Anki marks a card a leech after 8 lapses and suspends it (Anki 2026c).
- The mnemonic medium is a text with review prompts embedded in it, then scheduled for spaced review (Matuschak 2019).
What the field calls it
| Research name | What it covers here |
|---|---|
| Retrieval practice, testing effect, test-enhanced learning | why answering a card helps; reviewed in the core |
| Spacing effect, distributed practice, successive relearning | why reviews are spread; reviewed in the core |
| Paired-associate learning | the laboratory form of a two-sided card (cue and target) |
| Generation effect | memory for what the learner produces against what is read (Slamecka 1978) |
| Cue overload, interference | similar cues competing at recall (Watkins 1975; Nairne 2002) |
| Semantic clustering | learning related words in one set (Tinkham 1993) |
| Self-regulated study, metacognitive control | the learner's own choices: dropping, stopping, cramming (Bjork 2013) |
| Word cards, vocabulary cards | the second-language name for flashcards (Nakata 2011; Wilkinson 2020) |
| Digital flashcards, spaced repetition software (SRS) | the software form (Zung 2022) |
| Adjunct questions, embedded questions | questions placed in a text; reviewed in the core and in practice-questions |
What practitioners call it
| Practice name | Meaning, and who uses it |
|---|---|
| Minimum information principle | one fact per card; rule 4 of Wozniak 1999 |
| Atomic prompts | the same idea in Nielsen 2018 and Bjornstad 2020 |
| Cloze deletion | a sentence with a part hidden; rule 5 of Wozniak 1999, a note type in Anki 2026a |
| Image occlusion | the cloze of a picture (Anki 2026a) |
| Reversed card | the same note asked in both directions (Anki 2026a) |
| Leech, suspend, bury | Anki's names for failing cards and their handling (Anki 2026c) |
| Shared deck, premade deck, "Zanki" | ready-made decks; the medical-school vocabulary names decks (Lu 2021) |
| Ankify, deep Ankification | turning a text or a proof into cards (Nielsen 2019) |
| Mnemonic medium | Quantum Country (Matuschak 2019); Orbit, a later spaced repetition platform in one author's repository (GitHub 2026h) |
| SRS | the scheduler and its app; the practitioners' word for the whole practice |
- The practitioners' "minimum information principle" has no matching research term.
- This search found no study under that name (protocol, string F7).
- The nearest research names are item complexity in paired associates and set size (Nakata 2016).
Search terms tried, three ways
- Academic: flashcards, word cards, paired associates, generation effect, cue overload, semantic clustering, self-regulated study, successive relearning, embedded questions.
- Acronym and product: SRS, Anki, Quizlet, SuperMemo, image occlusion; AnKing in the grey search only.
- Author: Wozniak, Kornell, Nakata, Matuschak.
- Zero results ("mnemonic medium" in ERIC and arXiv, "minimum information principle" in ERIC) were rephrased; the rephrasings found practice texts only.
Not reviewed here
- Whether retrieval and spacing work: the core learning-science review, strand 2.
- Scheduling algorithms (SM-2, FSRS, half-life regression): the core's FSRS benchmark, Open Spaced Repetition 2026a, in the same file, strand 8.
- Questions written into a study text, their format and feedback: the practice-questions review.
- The order of exercises and problems: the exercise-sets review.
- Glossaries and key-term lists printed in a text: the instructional-text review.
- Folded answers in a page: progressive disclosure.
- Models that write cards are covered here only as a source of cards (Q7); models as readers are in LLM readers.