How to deal with high Personal Deck counts
What happens when Personal Deck counts get too high?
One common issue on Podsie is when students start to fall behind on reviewing their Personal Deck, which causes for some students in your class to have a large quantity of “due” questions. So, what should you do in these situations?
First, don’t panic! This is a normal part of using spaced retrieval practice, especially in a classroom setting. Second, the most important thing to understand is that when it comes to the Personal Deck (and spaced retrieval practice), consistent review is much more important than getting the Personal Deck count down to zero. Consider the following examples:
- Both John and Sarah have 100 questions due in their Personal Decks.
- John is dismayed, so he spends 2 hours one night to get his Personal Deck down to 0. John is essentially cramming information, and even though he gets the Personal Deck count down to 0, he missed a lot of questions and didn’t take the time to understand what he missed because his top priority was “clearing” the Personal Deck. The next day, all of those missed questions are scheduled for review again in the Personal Deck, and John becomes even more discouraged.
- On the other hand, Sarah sets a goal to consistently review 20 Personal Deck questions each day. It only takes her 10-15 minutes to do these 20 questions, and she has enough time to digest and clarify prior misconceptions. After 2 weeks of consistent review, her Personal Deck is now in a manageable state, and she’s confidently retaining a lot more material!
With that said, here are some tools to help you keep your students motivated with consistent review:
- Personal Deck Assignments - consider assigning these special assignment types that incentivize consistent review over a period of time.
- Personal Deck Freezes - if your students are going on holiday and don’t plan on doing Podsie during that time, freeze their decks! You can do this in “Settings” > “Freeze Personal Deck”
- Deactivating questions that are no longer necessary for students to master - you can deactivate questions in the questions area of the “Student Progress” section. Here
- Reviewing questions with your students - Sometimes, studying the Personal Deck is discouraging for students because they haven’t fully learned and understood the content. You can see signs of this when students start missing the same question multiple times in a row. In these cases, consider using the “Review mode” feature to Review struggling questions.