But isn't this just "memorization"? I'm opposed to "drill & kill" learning!

In the past several years, many prominent educators have advocated that we should move away from "memorization" and toward a more constructivist, project-based learning approach to education. Brainscape agrees with this and you can read more on this topic here in our Academy!

Yet we also remind educators that most subjects involve at least some amount of knowledge that needs to be acquired in order to apply the skills. (e.g. It's helpful to be able to label the kidneys on a diagram before you cut into the frog for dissection.) And even when knowledge is first acquired incidentally, through the application of real-world skills, that does not mean it is retained forever. Students still need an efficient way to reinforce their new knowledge.

Brainscape's most important value is to help educators get memorization out of the classroom. Our web & mobile study platform makes it easy to find, create, and share adaptive flashcards so that students can study on their own time, on their own devices, so that they come to class ready to apply that knowledge through the great collaborative activities that you will now have time to focus on.

What's more, if you structure your lesson plan in a way that lets students collaboratively create their own shared digital flashcards, then you are implementing much more than just behaviorist drill & practice in your class.

Student flashcard authors must use higher-level Bloom's Taxonomy skills such as Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation as they work together to determine (i) which information to flashcard-ify, (ii) how to rephrase the questions & answers most clearly, and (iii) how to organize the flashcards in the most logical way.

There are an infinite number of ways that you can use Brainscape as a tool to bridge the gap between Behaviorist and Constructivist learning strategies, for just about any subject in the world. So be creative, and feel free to share any innovative new Brainscape applications with us!

Still have questions and can't find the answer?  Be sure to email our Tech Support Team ([e-mail]). 

If you'd love to vote for a new Brainscape feature, see what others are requesting, or get a sneak peek at features in our pipeline, please check out Brainscape User Feature Requests Forum!  Please choose to Sign in with Brainscape (if you are commenting/requesting a new feature) so any feedback is tied to your account.  Or you can even access the tool from our web/mobile menus which won't require you to login separately. 

(Hint:  to save time, search first to see if your desired feature is already in the list so you can just vote/comment.)

And for more FREE study advice don't forget to check out the Brainscape Academy.