At UWorld, we take an active approach to learning. But active learning can take many different forms, eg, doing practice questions, taking notes, or using flashcards. While the UWorld CFA Level 1 Learning Platform lets you use all these types of active learning, this article will focus on flashcards that incorporate spaced repetition.
What Is Spaced Repetition?
Spaced repetition is a scientifically proven learning technique that enables students to more efficiently and effectively master concepts while studying and recall them as needed. It works by hacking the brain to boost memory retention by presenting data sets in specific intervals. This is called the spacing effect.
Spaced repetition emphasizes the repeated review of information at different intervals according to the difficulty of the concepts being studied. This schedule means that the more you master the concepts you are learning over a given period, the less frequently you will need to review them. Let’s explore how it works in practice with our CFA Level 1 Learning Platform.
Using Digital Flashcards With Spaced Repetition
Within the UWorld CFA question bank (QBank) dashboard, there is a “Study” mode where you can access customizable study sessions using flashcards with spaced repetition. As you study the relevant CFA concepts among thousands of practice questions and create flashcards to review later, you can assign a difficulty level (“Again,” “Good,” “Easy”) to your flashcards that determines the intervals within which they reappear during your study sessions.
How It Works:
- Again. Flashcards you mark as “Again” denote concepts you find more complicated and will appear very frequently (every minute) until you’ve mastered them. Once you have understood the concepts, they reappear less often.
- Good. Flashcards you mark as “Good” denote concepts you understand reasonably well and will appear less frequently in your study sessions (about every 10 minutes) until you’ve mastered the information before decreasing in frequency.
- Easy. Flashcards you mark as “Easy” denote concepts you grasp very well and will appear over much longer intervals (every four days).
This spaced repetition of flashcards by the degree of difficulty of the concepts creates a pattern that challenges your brain to understand the information you are reviewing and recall the concepts you’ve mastered on test day.
Organizing Your Flashcards in the QBank
Using UWorld’s digital flashcards with spaced repetition makes studying for the CFA Exam a lot easier. Within your QBank, you can use the “Flashcards” pop-up to quickly search, move, and expand flashcards with UWorld CFA content, plus create new flashcards or add more content to an existing flashcard.
To better organize your flashcard, you can use the “Browse” feature to create new flashcards and create more intuitive search filters and custom tags. Organize your flashcard decks by “Subject” or “System” filters or using the custom tags you created to identify the material you wish to review.
Flashcards with spaced repetition have proven to be an effective active-learning study method to enhance human learning and remember more of what you learn. We hope you will use our digital flashcards with spaced repetition to master the CFA concepts tested on the CFA Exam so that you can recall them on test day more easily.
We wish you the best of luck!
Prepare with our CFA Level 1 learning platform featuring flashcards with spaced repetition; click here for a FREE trial.