Boston-based SAT tutor James S. Murphy, who wrote about the College Board's revised approach to SAT vocabulary for The Atlantic this past December, takes a different approach in a piece for Slate this week, where he chronicles the history of the flashcard.
Citing the College Board's recent announcement that a revised SAT "will focus on relevant words, the meanings of which depend on how they're used," such that students will "no longer … use flashcards to memorize obscure words, only to forget them the minute they put their test pencils down," Murphy ultimately concludes,
The recently released Vocabulary.com app contains what may be the first significant improvement on the flashcard model of learning in 200 years in the form of a game, which starts off with a question that might ask you to fill in a blank in a sentence or find a synonym. But what happens next is crucial. The difficulty adapts to each individual user based on her performance. By the time I quit my first session, after some 300 questions, I had learned several new words, including "esurient" and "palter." The game uses repetition to aid retention, quizzes users on multiple meanings of a word, and provides access to "words in the wild," so users can better appreciate the meanings of a word.
(For our take on the College Board announcement, read Vocabulary.com curriculum director Georgia Scurletis on "The Real News About the Redesigned SAT.")
It turns out, flashcard history makes for fascinating reading, involving educators without access to books, a father introducing his three-year-old to Greek, and a pig who used flashcards to demonstrate an understanding of basic math. So why is the College Board moving away from the flashcard model? They're appropriate for learning, Murphy explains, just not for learning words.
The power and the problem with flashcards lie in the way they reduce knowledge to static particles, which, in some cases, is just fine. As Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, pointed out to me, flashcards are "great for the discrete fact." A chemical reaction is a chemical reaction, no matter the context. But what about a word like "reaction," which has several meanings, depending on the context? Can a flashcard attend to the surprising richness and shifting nuances of a word like "reaction?" Or does a person need to encounter it in its various environments—the neurological, the chemical, the dermatological—in order to appreciate its multifacetedness?
What's at issue on the question of vocabulary flashcards is what we fundamentally believe a word to be. If, like the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson, we believe that "words are but substitutes for objects and situations," then the flashcard is a good way to learn not just about words but also about the world. The source for this model of thinking about education and language is Lockean psychology, which saw the mind as a blank slate waiting for impressions and which encouraged teaching methods, like flashcards, that emphasized repetition and recitation in order to make sure these impressions stuck.
If, however, we think of a word as less a token than a tool, then the flashcard is deeply inadequate. George A. Miller, a founder of cognitive psychology, argued in "On Knowing a Word," that a "person who knows a word knows much more than its meaning and pronunciation." They also understand "the contexts in which a word can be used to express a particular meaning" and possess "the ability to exploit context in order to determine meaning and resolve potential ambiguities." The neat one-to-one correspondence of the flashcard fails to capture the intricacies of what Vocabulary.com refers to as "words in the wild." The challenge for teachers and students today is how to reckon with this model of language and of learning and move beyond flashcards.
In the same way that card learning addressed the needs of the 19th-century classroom, a digital technology might do the same for a 21st-century one. Paper dictionary definitions are restricted to a few citations, at most, to illustrate various word meanings; online dictionaries, on the other hand, can provide access to large collections of example sentences from a much broader range of sources. Dictionaries embedded in e-readers and tablets also make it easier and faster to look up words on the fly, exploring their meaning in the moment and, presumably, increasing the odds that we will understand and remember the word and what it means.…The traditional flashcard will no doubt live on in areas where cold facts need to be memorized and regurgitated, but the days when "esurient" was written out one side of a 3x5 piece of paper and its definition on the other are coming to an end.