How this app helps you learn

Make Me Smarter is practice: short sets of questions you answer from memory. This page explains what it is built on, and what it can and can’t do.

Answering beats re-reading

Trying to recall an answer helps you remember it for longer than reading it again: the “testing effect” (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). A large review of study techniques rated practice testing and spaced practice as the two most useful (Dunlosky et al., 2013). So every level is made of questions, and every miss shows the right answer and how to get there.

Spaced review

A missed question comes back the next day, then after longer and longer gaps: 2, 4, 8 and 16 days for skills, and up to 64 days for exact facts. Spreading practice out works better than cramming it together (Cepeda et al., 2006).

Mixed practice

“Mix it up” shuffles different kinds of questions together. Mixing makes practice feel harder, but it helps you choose the right method later (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007).

Trying first

Lessons ask you to try an example before they show the trick. Trying first, even if you get it wrong, helps you remember the answer when you then see it (Kornell, Hays & Bjork, 2009).

How sure are you?

After you pick an answer, you can say how sure you are. Stats then shows whether “Sure” really means right. Confident mistakes come back first in Review: a mistake you were sure of is more likely to be corrected once you see the right answer (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001), but it can creep back later, so it’s worth checking again (Butler, Fazio & Marsh, 2011).

Your own notes

In Retention Notes you save something you want to keep: a fact, a word, a formula, a photo or a voice memo. You write it yourself, in your own words, because things you put into words yourself are easier to recall than things you only read (Bertsch et al., 2007).

Forgetting is fastest soon after learning and slows down after that, and learning something again takes less work than the first time (Ebbinghaus, 1885). So a note’s first review is the next day. After that, each time you remember it the gap doubles: it comes back on day 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63 and 127. The best gap grows with how long you want to keep something (Cepeda et al., 2008).

Every review starts with the question only. You try to remember the rest, out loud or in your head, and only then look and say how it went: rating yourself with the answer already in front of you makes things seem better known than they are (Koriat & Bjork, 2005). A note you forgot comes back once more at the end of the review and again the next day. Recalling something until you get it right, then doing that again on later days, is a powerful way to study (Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022). A photo with a few words is often easier to recall than the words alone (Paivio & Csapo, 1973).

Where the techniques come from

• Mental math tricks from “Secrets of Mental Math” (Arthur Benjamin and Michael Shermer) and “Vedic Mathematics” (Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, 1965). The methods are ordinary algebra; historians dispute that they come from the ancient Vedas.
• The memory palace and the major system, as described in “Moonwalking with Einstein” (Joshua Foer).
• Reasoning questions in the spirit of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (Daniel Kahneman), “How to Solve It” (George Pólya) and Raymond Smullyan’s knights and knaves puzzles.
• Habit tips from “Atomic Habits” (James Clear) and “Tiny Habits” (BJ Fogg).
• Spaced review of your own notes, as described in “Make It Stick” (Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel) and “How We Learn” (Benedict Carey). Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured how we forget, in the 1880s.

What it can’t do

Practice makes you faster and more accurate at the kinds of questions you practise, the memory techniques help you remember what you use them on, and reviewing your notes helps you keep what’s in them. Research has not shown that brain-training games raise IQ, or improve memory, attention or school results in everyday life (Simons et al., 2016). We don’t claim they do.

References

• Bertsch, S., Pesta, B. J., Wiscott, R. & McDaniel, M. A. (2007). The generation effect: A meta-analytic review. Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201–210.
• Butler, A. C., Fazio, L. K. & Marsh, E. J. (2011). The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(6), 1238–1244.
• Butterfield, B. & Metcalfe, J. (2001). Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1491–1494.
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T. & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T. & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
• Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius, Trans.). Teachers College, Columbia University. First published in German in 1885.
• Koriat, A. & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one’s knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187–194.
• Kornell, N., Hays, M. J. & Bjork, R. A. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–998.
• Paivio, A. & Csapo, K. (1973). Picture superiority in free recall: Imagery or dual coding? Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 176–206.
• Rawson, K. A. & Dunlosky, J. (2022). Successive relearning: An underexplored but potent technique for obtaining and maintaining knowledge. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(4), 362–368.
• Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Rohrer, D. & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481–498.
• Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N. et al. (2016). Do “brain-training” programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.