I was so happy when WK introduced the extra study stuff. It indicates that they also agree that “extra” reviews of early stage stuff is extremely worthwhile. I think this is especially true for anyone that, like me, only does one review session per day. It’s really hard to remember stuff from lessons you performed over 24 hours ago! More iterations for new stuff makes intuitive sense.
I’m an engineer and a bit of a data geek. The old engineering adage is that “if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” And there is no data as fascinating to me as my own!
Anyway, I now have quantifiable data to show that these self study sessions launched from the Ganbarometer are paying off.
I started doing self-study reviews of things in stages 1-2 every morning before my “real” reviews in January or early February IIRC. I iteratively repeat the self-study reviews until I get 100% of the new items correct. Obviously, these extra reviews make it MUCH easier to answer correctly during my formal review session since I just reviewed those a few minutes ago (though I clearly still miss 5-10% regularly).
Because I only do these out-of-band reviews for items in stages 1-2, I feel strongly that it’s purely beneficial to my learning (I still use the self-study userscript rather than WK’s extra study, but it’s basically the same thing). IMO, it’s not cheating at all. It just means that instead of re-reviewing these items at 4h and 8h intervals, I get one “review” the day before (the lesson itself) then several in a row each morning before the formal session. I still get the normal re-quizzing after multi-day intervals for everything else.
I noticed today that this shows up pretty clearly in my own stats (from the wonderful workload graph userscript):
That little bump in overall “Apprentice” level items (the pink line) seems pretty significant to me.
It’s even more pronounced when you look at all four Apprentice stages broken out individually:
My accuracy for what I assume is Apprentice 1 stuff jumped by more than 10%!
I think the smaller jump from ~79% accuracy to ~85% accuracy in January, 2021 was due to me starting to consciously review items that hadn’t yet guru’d: just looking at items in the progress section of the dashboard that didn’t have all five boxes ticked beneath them, and shift-clicking to bring up their pages in a separate tab if I didn’t remember them.
My accuracy for enlightened items (light blue line) also appears to be improving slightly. It’s too early to tell if this trend will continue, but if it does I’m not sure what to attribute it to. It could be that increasing my accuracy for early stage items also paid dividends with later stage stuff. Higher accuracy and less mental friction from misses seems to help me focus and better disambiguate similar characters that I’d been confusing previously.
Anyway, this is pretty wonky analysis that probably won’t interest anyone else, but I find my own data endlessly fascinating. I’m completely convinced that more frequent “extra” study of recently introduced items has already paid significant dividends.
[I wasn’t sure where to put this, but since even after the extra study section was added to the dashboard I still use the Ganbarometer to launch self-study of items in stages 1 and 2, I thought this was as good a place as any.]