SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, balloons taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. Your kid is highlighting their textbook, reading their notes, and feeling productive. According to the cognitive science, those are some of the worst things that can they can be doing. Andrew Cohen is the CEO of Brainscape, a learning platform used by millions of students from AP up to the bar exam. And he built it on the science of how people actually retain information. Today we're breaking down what real studying looks like. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I am Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college prep without wasting thousands of dollars in years of time. And the answer usually involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game that schools aren't telling you. And that's why I'm thrilled to have Andrew Cohen here today. Andrew is the founder and the CEO of Brainscape, one of the world's largest leading smart flashcard platforms used by millions of students. He came to EdTech from International Consulting and the World Bank. Then he earned a master's at Columbia Teachers College, where he engineered the foundational algorithm behind Brainscape. His work is rooted in cognitive science, and his platform is used for everything from the AP exams to the bar. So we're going to dive into why most studying is a waste of time and what cognitive-based repetition actually means and how parents and students should be approaching academic learning if they actually want real results that sticks. So, Andrew, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh, great to be here and what a great introduction. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Absolutely. I've given them the six the highlights, right? So I would love to hear the 60-second rundown of who are you and what do you do for education and learning specifically?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Well, I found it Brainscape because I had the problem of studying inefficiently myself. As you mentioned, I lived in working with the World Bank. I was living in Panama. I was actually working on a very high-profile anti-corruption project. I had to get real good at Spanish. And I was kind of a deer in headlights, staring at TV cameras, interviewing me about corruption and controversial projects. So I needed to just get down and learn Spanish a lot more efficiently. And so I ended up making a Microsoft Excel macro that would just kind of quiz me in a in a pattern that made sense for me. And it ended up so effective for me that I wanted to create a company out of it. And I sort of discovered these principles that are relatively universal, that we've known about for so many decades, but that have just been woefully underutilized. So Brainscape is a web and mobile study platform now that's now used by over 11 million users to find, create, and share adaptive flashcards. Because it turns out that the old school flashcard is the most effective way to internalize concept-based information, right? Knowledge-intensive information, so that you could then apply that knowledge to all the great skills and applications and other things that you know real education is best suited for keying us up for. So we are a team of 30 globally and just out to help the world study as efficiently as humanly possible.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Now, in Panama, did you help at all with the CIA and Noriega, or is that classified?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Is that I can't tell you I'd have to carry it. It was actually it was like a decade after uh Noriega had been ousted, but everyone had a story. Just like we've got a story. Where were you on 9-11? They had a story. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

I worked with my first one of my first jobs was cutting grass on a golf course. And I worked with two professional alcoholics, and one of them was in the Noriega raid, and he said they got two pallets of like thousands of dollars and a pallet of drugs. And they took a lot, they stuffed money down a the thing. There's a crap like crazy, crazy story. But that you know, your background is very intriguing. You went to Colombia, worked for the World Bank, and this, like you developed this algorithmic that you know, another famous Ivy League grad developed an algorithm that's controlling a lot of the world with Facebook. But so you started international consulting, you ran technology projects for the World Bank. What pulled you towards education from there?

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Well, the product that I made for myself, this Microsoft Excel macro, it just worked so well for me that you know people were telling me we've never seen anybody that got so much better at a language so quickly. You know, I'm not I'm not writing Dickens in in Spanish, but you know, from from where I started, but I I had like had a minor in Spanish in college. I kind of sucked, I was trying to use Rosetta Stone to being able to have a seat at cabinet level meetings, uh, working with the, you know, the administration of uh Martin Torrijos, who had just been elected on this anti-corruption platform. And people are saying, you know, how did you get so much better at Spanish? And so I started showing people this Excel program that I'd written. And uh a couple of friends that were grad students at the University of Panama said, you know, can I use this program to put in my own questions and answers, right? I'm in a public administration uh degree or I'm in a history master's degree. And so I shared this with them. This is 2006, 2007. So, so kind of right before the iPhone was was even a thing. And before I knew it, this Excel spreadsheet goes viral over email. People are sharing it with each other, students are kind of making their own questions uh for different exams, and they're saying, you know, this this should be a website, this should be, this should be a tool that people can can use. And then I see, you know, Steve Jobs presents the iPhone and the app store comes out and said, Man, I I should probably, you know, take take this knowledge, that this passion that I have uh and and put it to work. But who the hell am I to create a tech startup, right? I don't know anything about tech and anything about education. So that was what brought me to Columbia University. Uh, and I I sort of made this the focus of my entire degree, my master's project, uh, my thesis, I sort of became the Brainscape white paper. And so I sort of like was was forced to create this because I couldn't imagine a world where this didn't exist. I was just sort of the vehicle for for bringing it to life.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Yeah, that's incredible. That was a 16-year journey from when you launched Brainscape. And like looking back on it in 2010, what's the one thing about how kids learn that the cognitive science showed you that you wish more parents understood?

SPEAKER_01 6:57

We think of learning kind of linearly. We think that if we wrap information delivery in some magical pixie dust, like we tell a more engaging story, or we use mnemonic devices, or there's more emotion involved, or there's there's more hypermedia, or these, these myths of like learning styles, right? I'm a kinesthetic learner, I'm a visual learner, I'm an auditory learner, and we just present this knowledge in this like amazing way, this really great educator, that it's just gonna stick better. And what I think people don't appreciate is that knowledge acquisition, it's it's a process, right? You can't, you can have the most enriching bucket of of water with nutrients in it for a plant. And if you dump that entire bucket of water, you just put more and more nutrients on it, and you dump it all on a plant the night before, the plant's probably gonna die, right? The best way to water a plant is you you would kind of spray a mist over a sustained period of time, same amount of water, or maybe even net, net half the amount of water, half the amount of study time needed, then you would be cramming, but just actually spread over time. So, how can you create a system of learning? Because that the idea of that sounds daunting. It's like, oh yeah, sure, I'm gonna study five times a day, I'm gonna bring out my my books, I'm just gonna be this perfect student that that you know starts studying a month before the test. Nobody does that, right? But is there a way that you could actually make a world like that where it's not inconvenient, where it's not a schlep, where I just pull out my phone, I tap one button when I've got two minutes because I'm waiting for a friend or I'm sitting on the can or whatever, and it's and it's kind of giving me the metrics, the gamification, the habit formation in the same way that I was I was playing a game or that I was, you know, using a fitness app to watch myself improve. That's that's how easy we want studying to be. And it just becomes a logistics question of how do you get the information that I'm that you're studying in class into this system that can then be delivered in such an efficient and convenient way.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

So almost like micro learning before micro-learning was a thing, in a way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Yeah, not so similar for microlearning. I think the the way that the term micro learning has kind of been used, if I'm, you know, kind of reading the the world of media uh correctly, it's more like on-demand corporate micro videos is kind of how I see micro learning. Uh but the same idea, right? Like the the more bite-sized it is, the the easier it is to actually determine how soon that this should be repeated to you, right? Where where the and then that's kind of the most important thing about kind of the uh the spreading out is that you're spreading it out, but where every single time you see a piece of information, the that piece of information is customed to your pace of learning. So the things that you're really weak at should come up much more frequently, and the things that you know really well should come up increasingly less frequently until you never see it again. And so you're always staying in that zone of proximal development without having to force yourself to do it. It just the system kind of does that for you. And that's really the hardest part, right? If you're studying and you've got, you know, a 300-page book and you've got your highlights or whatever, and somewhere in that book are the are the 25 hardest concepts that you're probably about to forget today if you don't study them right now. But you don't know where they are in the traditional book, right? You're you're just gonna be like magically having to flip through and oh my gosh, like maybe I'll I'll use the pink highlighted passages because that's pretty. And I'm I'm that meant something when I highlighted in pink, but now I know it a little bit better, so it probably shouldn't be pink anymore. But too bad, you use the pink highlighter. So it's just it's it's rigid, it's linear, it's an efficient way to perfectly adaptively repeat that information in the same way that technology can do.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

So the most counterintuitive thing in your work is that highlighting and rereading, right? Every kid does it. Yeah, I have mine right here. You're telling me that it's pretty it's so pretty, it's so pretty. It is, it's color-coded. It's like I got points. So you're telling me that it's just all worthless. So, like, what does the science actually say?

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Yeah, no, I mean, highlighting can be useful as a staging ground for eventually creating an asset that could then become a custom repetition asset. In other words, I first go through the the textbook and I highlight things based on how well I know it the first pass through, right? So maybe the the yellow things are things that, yeah, I'm uh this is important and I I don't know it that well. And then like the red or ink things are things that are like this is important and I don't know them at all. Right. And so you then though have to go through the the the book and you probably should translate those things into flashcards. You should have either paper flashcards or ideally uh a digital flashcard platform, right, on your laptop, on your phone, where you're taking the passage and you're transforming it into a question-answer pair, which one does on a flashcard. And so not only are you are you um creating an asset that you then can study later, and every time you see it, you rate on a scale of one to five, how well did I know this? And that determines how frequently it's gonna it's gonna repeat. But even the act of making that flashcard, the act of taking a kind of monolithic, you know, linear piece of of information, a paragraph of text, and turning it into a question-answer that forces you to think of the material in a different way, to process it more deeply. We call that elaborative interrogation. Yeah. And it's just the act of making the flashcards is already half the battle. And then you're able to, you know, spread it out using that really easy study system that something like Brainscape provides.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Well, it makes sense because there's been so much, so much effort in academics for RTII response to intervention and multi-tiered systems that support MTSS. And a lot of RTII, we're moving towards more NTSS language, was you learn something, they didn't achieve, now they relearn something. And all the research shows that is actually the least effective way to learn. The research says if you actually can front load the content that they're gonna, you know, a kid struggles with math, you front load it before then in a small group setting or one-on-one, they are actually able to make gains significantly off their peers. So you're if you're you know on the same concept of have you guys done anything with that in terms of encouraging kids to front load their their content through your through your platform to pre-learn the material so that the acquisition of the knowledge is there and they're they're actually retaining it better.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

I've seen a lot of teachers structure their class in a way that encourages the pre-learning because they'll they'll say tomorrow morning in class, there's going to be a quiz. And in order to study for this quiz, you need to study these flashcards the night before. And and this quiz is on a lesson that they haven't even taught yet, right? It's just it's the 10 or 20 things that that they should know as sort of background for photosynthesis or whatever the concept is. So they go study these flashcards, they come into class, they have a quiz. So they've sort of like front-loaded and primed their knowledge. And then so when they actually read that lesson or they hear the lesson in class, they participate in the lesson, it's going to be so much more salient and so much more likely to stick than if they just came into the lesson fresh without having done preliminary work, preliminary problems, preliminary studying with Brainscape with a test or or whatever the incentive was. Because, you know, without some priming, without some pre-work, it can kind of go right over your head. So we've we've seen, uh, I think maybe kind of another way to say it is people often think of flashcards as as only being a summative activity, right? You do the lesson, then you study it later. But actually kind of studying before a lesson, you're not getting as deep, obviously, as the teacher will in class, but you're you're you're kind of priming the information, uh, is certainly another tactic.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

So most parents have heard of some space repetition, but most don't understand what actually makes it work. So can you explain basically what students should be doing rather than just highlighting their rereading? Like what kind of go deeper with what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

You are best able to retain information when the interval of repetition. So you you first were presented information, you first learned it, and then you wait a certain amount of time to repeat it. If that time that you wait to repeat it is just long enough that you were otherwise right about to forget it, then when you finally uh try to retrieve that piece of information again, you you see that flashcard again, you somebody asks you to answer the question on a worksheet, whatever it is, you're right in that sweet spot, the zone of proximal development where you're otherwise just about to forget it, then it is most likely to be strengthened so that you're gonna remember it for longer. So if I just taught you a new word in Spanish, let's say, you know, here's the the word for uh do you know how to say meatball in Spanish? No, I don't. Yeah, it's albundiga, right? Albundica. Not a tough word, right? Albundica. And I could I could show you the text, I could show you a picture of it, you know, whatever the senses are. But because it's a tough word, if I don't ask you again, hey, how do you say meatball, within probably 30 seconds or two minutes, you probably would forget it, right? If I wait 20 minutes and then I say, hey, how do you say meatball again? You're like, I don't know, I forgot that, you know, 15 minutes ago, right? But if I asked you right now, hey, how do you say meatball?

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Albundiga.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Albundiga, right? That was probably a little too soon because I just you know said that. So maybe I should have waited a minute or two or two minutes, right? By asking you again just immediately, that was kind of a waste of your time because you already knew it. If I waited 20 minutes and you've forgotten it, it's also a waste of your time because you have to relearn it. So, how do you get the interval of repetition just in that sweet spot that you're just about to forget it? Or maybe you even just did forget it and then you're being corrected and you say, Oh yes, I knew that, right? That that experience of like, oh yes, I knew that and I'm being corrected, that's where real learning happens. So, what Brainscape does is we we take all the knowledge that you've learned, right? It's broken down into that binary question-answer format, and we just create this personalized knowledge stream that is as close as possible to every single card, every single piece of information you see being right in that zone of proximal development, right? You know, maximizing your cognitive load without being in cognitive overload mode. And you can't you can't optimize use of study time more efficiently than that by keeping everything in that zone of proximal development.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

So for uh a kid studying for like an AP exam, say AP biology with 200 terms to learn. What's the practical playbook? Where do they start and what's the rhythm?

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Well, I love that you're asking about AP content because Brainscape has about a dozen pre-made packages of great content. I think uh for bio, I could I could probably look up, it's probably many more hundred cards than than that. It might be might be 600, 1,000. And it's not just vocabulary either. So a lot of times people think of flashcards and they think a flashcard is just a vocab word, word and definition. It could be a diagram and label this part of the diagram. It could also be a process question, right? Describe the steps in photosynthesis or in the Krebs cycle, or it could be a case study, right? You know, the this thing happens to a to a cell that's in distress, that's dehydrated. You know, what might be happening? What's this process called? And and uh, you know, how how would you diagnose it? I'm now getting into kind of more medical type content, but these are the types of things you could have on flashcards. So that's why, you know, the AP biology content we have is is so rich. But anyway, getting back to how they would use it, you'd find the Brainscape AP biology product on our marketplace, you add it to your library, and then you just push one button, the study button, and it starts showing you flashcards that is in the order in which you know it's scaffold the things you see them. And every flashcard that you see, it asks you once you see the answer on a scale of one through five, how well did you know this? How confident were you? And based on your confidence, it determines how soon to show it to you again. So it's just a constantly evolving, constantly improving mix of flashcards. And Brainscape gives you a series of metrics to make sure that you know you're on the right track, to make sure you know how much time at this rate of learning would it take you to get to 100% mastery of this deck or of this entire collection. How should you meter out those hours of studying over time, right? If you've got 17 more hours of total study before your 100% mastery, and okay, you know, I've got I've got three months before the exam, you should probably start metering out those hours, right? Because you don't you don't want to spend 17 hours studying in the three days before the exam, if if that is in fact, you know, how much the the product predicts that you'd have to learn at that rate. So Brainscape gives you an entire, an entire journey, all the all the different graphs that show you your your rate of of forgetting and how much you need to push yourself. We give you streaks in the same way, sort of duolingo, right? I'm on a I'm on an eight-day streak. I don't want to, I don't want to break it. Maybe we'll send you a little push notification, keep up the keep up the good work. So you're not only learning faster, but you're developing an identity as I'm somebody who does not wait to the last minute. I'm somebody who's not cram. I'm somebody who actually um plans my studying accordingly. And once they've learned that for the AP exams, they're gonna be able to take that much better study habit and uh succeed better in college because of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So you've served millions of users, bar takers, med students, language learners, AP students. What are the patterns you're seeing across all of them about what works?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

I would say that the underlying principles, the underlying psychographic of a brainscape learner is consistent regardless of what the demographic is, right? There's some There's somebody who is motivated. There's somebody who, you know, has discipline. And there's somebody who knows that if they're able to see the carrot right in front of their face, right? The here's if I could just do this much more that's it that's in front of me, I'm gonna be able to make it to unlock this next goal that's gonna unlock the the three goals from from here. So what works is is just being being devoted to what you're doing and and to being consistent about using the product and and just letting the product guide you in uh in the direction that it's best suited for.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

How about note-taking? Most kids spend hours on it. Is it worth doing it? Like if so, how should they be doing it?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

So you asked about AP as your first case study, and that was a great case study to illustrate Brainscape has content. So you would just go to the marketplace, add to your library, and start sitting our AP biology flashcards. If you're in a class that doesn't already have pre-made Brainscape flashcards, right? Let's say you're just in biology 101, you're not in the AP class, so it's not a standardized exam curriculum. It's your teacher, your publisher, your textbook, your exams, you know, it could come from your textbook, it could come from class notes, whatever you taking, whatever you're provided by the teacher and collating to make yourself responsible for internalizing, you're able to then use a product like Brainscape and chop it into bite-sized pieces because you ask, you know, does note-taking work? It works in the process of you're you're at least doing something to process the information and get it on paper, but it's not necessarily turning it into a retrieval activity where you're uh breaking it into some binary question-answer pair that's going to enable you to have retrieval events later, which is really where you're able to assess how well did I know it and and meter out that spaced repetition and keep yourself in the zone of proximal development. So note-taking is valuable as a first step, but you need to then go into the the notes and and somehow break it into uh whether you're putting dog ears on pages, which is the the easiest, you know, bite-sized thing, and and noting for yourself, I need to come back to this because this is hard. And you're sort of giving a manual space repetition, or whether you're highlighting in certain colors, which again, it's just it's just kind of passive and and isn't the perfect way. But if you're able to know that the reds are gonna make me go back to, fine. But really, really what you need to do is break it into bite-sized pieces that can be repeated, and and that's what's gonna help you retain it.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

We see a lot with kids coming into the program. Kids are studying more, but they're not smarter. Like they burn hours on low-yield stuff, same problem at you know, almost every level, AP, SAT, college. The stuff doesn't, the habits really don't change, but like walk me through what a kid should actually be doing on a Tuesday night. Like you have data on, I assume, millions of kids. So, like, what what is the most effective thing kids could be doing with their time?

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Open up Brainscape.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

This is a good problem. Hey, it works.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Anyway, I mean, obviously, you know, do your homework, right? If you've if you've got a paper to write, you know, do do all the things. But if in in the spirit of studying, if if you're keeping up with the information internalization for some exam that we presume is happening next week, next month, whatever it is, you don't want to fall behind. You don't want to be in a situation where you have to cram the night before. So I'm presumably in some amount of time before that exam is happening, I want to keep up with that. So, yeah, the first thing you do is if you have flashcards that are already made that need to be studied, make sure you've kept up with them. Make sure that you open up Brainscape and you've studied to the point where you have no more cards past due, right? That are in danger of being forgotten if you don't study them today. But then if you don't yet have all the material that you are studying in a format like this that can be repeated, uh go through your notes and start making flashcards for everything that's up until the point that you're in right now. And that doesn't have to be manual. I know that that sounds like especially a schlep because you're having to take every piece of information and chunk it into question-answer. But we do have AI features. It and AI does rob you a little bit of that interrogate, uh, the elaborative interrogation with which you're processing the information and turning it into question-answers yourself, but it does save you a tremendous amount of time. So you can upload your PowerPoint, your Word document, your YouTube video, your PDF. You could take a picture of the text in your textbook, and we'll create the flashcards for you. So you've got some asset, like I was mentioning before, that can be easily repeated in that spaced retrieval sequence that is so essential for keeping you in that zone of proximal development.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

What do you think the biggest mistake is on how kids structure a study session?

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Leaving it all for one at once, right? Trying to trying to study for six hours all at once because he waited to the last minute. I think there's sort of there's there's two mindsets that a learner might be in uh when studying. One is I have a lot of time right now, and I happen to be motivated, I have to be focused. Those times are rare, but when you feel that time, that is the perfect time to be making the flashcards because that's what you're sitting down, you're you're creating these, you know, very useful assets that you can study later. Then there's the rest of your time in your in your life where you're like, I've got 20 minutes here, I've got 20 minutes here, I really want to watch TV. I'm sitting on the on the bus uh with friends, I'm like waiting for you know my mom to come to the dinner table, and she's in the other room on the phone, and it's like I've got eight minutes here. All those types of time, if you've spent the time where you had focus to make the Brainscape flashcards, you can whip up your phone and you can just push the study button and you're repeating those flashcards with the right pattern of repetition. You're rating your confidence on a scale of one to five. And then, oh, my mom's here, right, dinner's ready, put your phone away. And it was that easy. You didn't have to pull out your books to study, you didn't have to uh pull out pencil and paper and write anything. You have to figure out what page I was on again to get started. All you have to do is just open your phone and push a single button. So think about when you're when you're studying, you know, is this a time when I actually have the focus and I've got all my materials and I could set up and make my flashcards? Or is this, you know, filler time that I don't have that much mental bandwidth? Maybe I'm even watching TV and I just want to go through stuff. And that's kind of the low fidelity uh flashcard study time.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

So cramming gets a bad name, but you there is an effective way to do it, potentially. Is that what you're is that what you're making the case for?

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Cramming, I guess you're saying in one long session, there's an effective way to use one long session.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yeah, you said don't. I mean, you know, you gotta crush something out in six hours before test tomorrow, obviously better prepared, but is there an effective way to do it or is it yeah?

SPEAKER_01 29:22

I mean, I think I I would use the word cramming. I think a lot of people use the word cramming as like waited till the last minute and procrastinate cramming. Yeah. So if you happen to have six hours to study and it's and the test is in two weeks, use those six hours now to make all those assets that you could then study over time. So even though you're you're batching a lot of time right now, I don't think I'd call that cramming in the way that people typically use the term.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

I I think you're right. I think it's combined with procrastinating, right? Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Yeah, and that's maybe, I mean, I don't know how to say this advice in in a pifty way, but there's probably a cool sentence where it's like, don't cram at the last minute, batch at the very beginning or something like that, right? Like do all the work up front so that future you, lazy you, can very easily study and and sort of sprinkle out those study sessions over the coming weeks.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

What about brain training apps like Elevate, Lumosity, like all of them? Are they doing anything?

SPEAKER_01 30:23

They're pretty cool. I've I've played with them, and I think what what the research tends to show is that they do get you better at the task that it is, right? If it's a reaction time task in this game, you get better at that game. Uh, but I think the jury's out on how well skills transfer. You know, just because I get really good at this, you know, memory game, is that going to make my memory better for my history test? Um, you know, maybe, maybe their in-house researchers might might uh come up with some some numbers that suggest they might, but uh, I think the peer-reviewed uh studies may uh may need a little bit more uh convincing.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

What are you seeing from like the study habits? You know, uh schools are schools are training kids like they did 40 years ago. Nothing really has evolved in in some of the study habits, but what what do you see from a a standpoint that schools should be doing and should be teaching kids on how to study?

SPEAKER_01 31:16

I would almost flip it onto the teachers and say, how might uh they change the way they do assessments to force students to have to learn to study in a different way? So the one thing that teachers could do, which in the past might have been cruel because it would have been so difficult to prepare this way, but now with tools like Brainscape, or I keep saying Brainscape, it could be Anki, by the way. There's there's other really good space repetition flashcard platforms or or or study platforms that even have other platforms besides space repetition. But what teachers can do is say, you know what? Instead of saying there's a cumulative exam on this date and this is when everyone's gonna study for, and everybody you know is gonna cram the night before, no matter how how much we teach students better study habits and cognitive science, whatever, they're all gonna wait till the night before. Instead, say twice during this semester, it could be it could be once, it could be three times. So you don't even know the number, it's all totally a surprise. There's going to be a pop cumulative test. It could be anytime, not a pop quiz, not a uh it's a pop cumulative test the entire day. So students need to be perpetually ready for that pop cumulative test. Again, in the old world, that would have been so cruel because how are they going to study all this material and they're forcing them? But all if all they have to do is, you know, batch the work up front to kind of create their flashcards, keep up to date with creating new flashcards, you know, for any any lessons that, you know, maybe one or two a week. But otherwise, just push the button and 10 flashcards a day, 20, 20 repetitions a day, it's not hard. It could be three minutes a day. But if you're always up to date with studying because the teacher has made that the incentive, what's going to happen is by the time there is a final exam, which probably is scheduled because the school is scheduled or whatever, students aren't even going to need to study because they've been so up to date with the material throughout the semester. They're going to be ready for the final. And not only that, they're probably going to remember the material for months or years, as opposed to currently everybody crams the night before the final because they hadn't been up to date beforehand. And then if you were to quiz them again a week after the final, they forgot everything already because it was just crammed to the last minute. So yeah, the pop cumulative exam, it's it's a tactic I would like to see a lot more, but I think it would totally transform how students study just because of the incentive, right? You show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

What about AI? It's everywhere now. Chat GBT, Claude can answer almost any factual question instantly. So why does memorization even matter anymore?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

You can't really make connections between concepts in your head if the concepts don't first live in your head. Yeah. Um, if you're if you're a doctor and a patient comes in and and says, you know, my my tibia hurts or whatever, you you don't want to have to say, hold on, let me let me look that up real quick and see what the tibia is. You need you need to have some form of information, right? Whether it's you know the underlying vocabulary terms, whether it's the processes. Uh so I think, you know, knowledge isn't isn't the question. It's curriculum design and perhaps uh making kids memorize trivial knowledge. That's more of a curriculum question. So if there's ever a test question that says, you know, what was the date on which Archduke Fran Ferdinand was assassinated? Right, that's just a terrible question. That's it, it's terrible to have any kids have to memorize that that date. But if the if the question is, you know, describe the historical significance of behind why the assassination was important and you know, what did it set off? That's an important thing for students to know to be able to be, you know, worldly and understand history and and discussions and repeating itself. And that's still a fact. It's not a bite-sized trivial date, but it's still something that could be flash cardified and could be repeated in a space repetition format. So there's there's a role for knowledge. I think, though, that that class time probably shouldn't be for you know solidifying that knowledge as much as it sometimes is, right? A teacher who stands in front of the class and says, hey, who knows the answer number seven, right? Raise your hand. Come write it on the board. And you know, even a lot of the lecturing that could be that could be delivered, you know, in other ways, that can be so much better outsourced to technology. The students can, you know, do less on their own, study on their own. The class is for assessment and it's for project-based learning, collaborative learning, simulations, discussions, debates, the types of things that are, you know, the skills that students are then going to take on to the real world and be and be more successful. But the knowledge acquisition part, technology is just so good at that. So if you can get it out of the classroom and make it homework, I think everybody ends up winning.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

From your seat as a ed tech SaaS founder and an investor, like what trends are you actually gonna see like change for how kids learn over the next three to five years?

SPEAKER_01 36:25

You probably see a pendulum that that goes toward using more and more AI and then continually realizing, as they already are, but I feel like they're it's gonna, it's gonna kind of blow up, where the amount of cognitive offloading and and loss of effort is gonna become so much more painful than it is. And we're gonna be looking at a generation behind us and saying they nobody knows how to do any effort anymore. And there's gonna be a lot of debate about, well, is it even important that they they knew the the underlying skills if they're able to abstract knowledge in such a way, right? Is it even important that we know how to do long division anymore if we've got calculators that could just do the division for us? And so now we could do higher-level math and higher level things. But at some point, maybe understanding how long division works and understanding the importance of it was still important. So I think I think you're probably gonna see a lot of a lot of backlash. You're probably gonna see a lot of sort of AI-free schools or or uh technology-free schools or anything. And I think there's there's probably gonna be a lot of uh choice for for parents and students to determine, you know, what what environments that they want to they want to go into. So I don't know. It's gonna be an interesting couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

How about from a parent of a younger, younger kid, nine, 10, 11, what's the most important thing they can do right now to set up real learning habits before high school?

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Incentivize frequent studying and participation. So if you want, if you want learning habits, right? What there's there's all kinds of different rules of thumb. You know, it takes 25 repetitions or seven days in a in a row, or you know, whatever, whatever the rules of thumb. And it probably depends on what the habit is, but there needs to be some form of frequency and repetition and anchor. So whether that's you know, every night at the dinner table, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about what you did in school today, and you you tell me five things. Um, that it becomes a habit. It just becomes a ritual. Or whether it's, you know, before we go to bed, you're gonna, you're gonna have to study uh such and such thing. Or when we're in the car, you know, I want you to, I want you to bring uh your book with you, or I want you to bring, you know, Brainscape with you, and we're gonna we're gonna go through flashcards in the car, whatever it is. So find some kind of an anchor habit. And then uh, you know, if you're a metrics person and what what a lot of teachers do, even so there's teachers and parents, you can look at a dashboard of all your students, or if you're just a parent, you could look at your kid's phone and you can say, how many days have they studied in the last six months, right? If you're a teacher, how many days have has each student studied this semester? And you can say, okay, there's 120 days this semester. 5% of your participation grade is you need to have studied on 40 different days. That's just one day every every third day. And I don't care if it's one flashcard or you just open up the app, you're you're developing an identity as somebody who shows up and who spreads it out over time. Because that's just that's the most important thing in terms of you know what learning habits to instill is the frequency and regularity. If it's lumpy, if it's just wait till the day before the test, you're not gonna retain anything, you're not gonna score well, and you're gonna end up having to spend two to three times more time just to get the same results than if you were able to conveniently sprinkle that out over time.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

So if I could play devil's advocate for a second, please. Some parents would say apps algorithms are just adding more screen time to my kids' life. They should be reading the book and writing notes by hand. What's your honest response?

SPEAKER_01 39:48

That's fair. And you did say, you did say nine and ten-year-old. And so I'd I'd probably uh somewhat empathize with that because I I want to get kids' phones and screens uh, you know, out of their faces as much as you possibly can. So if it's not Brainscape, or maybe if Brainscape, you know, lives on your phone, that's fine. But the anchor habits and especially the amount of content that you're learning when you're 10, you're not a medical student. You don't have to have 10,000 pieces of information that you're studying over three years and and really, really need something as powerful as Brainscape as you do. Maybe having 30 paper flashcards is completely fine. And you can bring those flashcards with you. So if you're a device-free household or you're trying to cut down on screen time, or you don't want the risk that you know after they use Brainscape and the kids gonna switch over to TikTok or or YouTube, I completely respect that. And so uh I'd switch to paper flashcards, but the the habits of spreading studying over time and then active recall, which is what you get from uh from your flashcard, right? Flipping over the answer instead of just reviewing it passively and spaced repetition. Like I'm gonna have a hard, a hard pile, a medium pile, and an easy pile, right? You're you're evaluating, you're using metacognition. How well did I know this? You know, those are the the cognitive science principles that mattered much more than, you know, are you using technology or not?

SPEAKER_00 41:07

All right. Well, let's move into uh lighting round. Just some rapid fire questions first thing that comes to mind, all right? Hit me. Most overrated study tool right now. Highlighters. One thing parents overthink about their kids studying. I don't know. The cost. How about something they underthink?

SPEAKER_01 41:30

That's my answer to your questions.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

Best book or resource on the science of learning. One quick study habit every student should add this week.

SPEAKER_01 41:39

The Feynman technique. Let's take it outside of Brainscape, which is my answer to everything. Feynman technique is the technique of uh trying to pretend you're teaching the concept to somebody else, ideally, somebody more clueless. It could be your your little sibling, your imaginary friend, your stuffed animal. Um, but after you you've got to some level of mastery of a subject, close the book and then just pretend that you're the one lecturing it, and then go back to the book and see how much did I miss. You know, that that act action is is so important. They say the best way to learn something is to teach it. That's uh that's one of my favorite techniques.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

If you could whisper one piece of advice to the parent of an AP student studying right now, what would it be? Brainscape. All right. There you go. It's a we you could use this as a cut-up for a Brainscape promo, huh?

SPEAKER_01 42:30

I know, man. If you want to send me some clips, I'm sure my uh people go nuts with it.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Well, it's awesome to meet you, Andrew. I really appreciate you coming on. I know we're both East Coasters, so it's coming up on 10 o'clock here as well, as we in the evening. And uh I appreciate you spending some time with us. You know, if for those that uh want to learn more about you and Brainscape, where is the best place for them to find you?

SPEAKER_01 42:54

You can find Brainscape's website at brainscape.com. You can find us on the App Store. You could find me personally, Andrew Cohen, on LinkedIn, on X. I don't really do the Instagram so much, and uh I'm I'm easy to reach out to if you uh just DM me or comment on my stuff. So hit me up.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

What's one thing you want parents to remember from this conversation before we wrap?

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Cognitive science isn't rocket science. The principles of active recall, metacognition, and space repetition can be grasped in minutes, and it's just a matter of weaving them into your life and your child's life, and you're you'd be very surprised at how much they can push their own cognitive load and their own performance, and how much they themselves can actually be made to understand the concepts of learning sciences so that they take learning increasingly into their own hands.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Andrew, thank you. I appreciate you sharing the science today. And uh hopefully we'll connect again. Uh, come back on maybe later on when we do an in-person one if I come to New York or something. Awesome, that'd be great. All right. We'll put all the links and everything we discussed in the show notes today. We'll have a link to a brainscape as well to download. Thank you all for listening to Support Learning Podcast, and we'll see you next time. Awesome. Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.