With the digitalization of the education process and the transfer of most of its stages to online settings, the services claiming to assist students in building essential academic skills such as critical thinking have gained quite strong popularity among learners and educators alike. Though services such as Anki are admittedly easy to use and easily integrated into the learning process, their actual usefulness and the effect that they supposedly have on students’ ability to memorize specific concepts and notions, particularly, in building a second language vocabulary, are yet to be researched in greater depth. However, even though services such as Anki allow managing the process of memorizing concepts and ideas based on the framework rooted in the notion of the forgetting curve, their effect on building actual critical thinking skills appears to be quite low.
Indeed, in essence, building critical thinking skills suggests that students should be provided with a theoretical framework, examples as the model to be used, and exercisers for training newly developed critical thinking abilities. The latter may include analysis, inference, and problem-solving (Seibert Hanson & Brown, 2020). In turn, online tools such as Anki do not represent a specific problem for a student to resolve per se. Instead, they offer an opportunity to train basic memory skills., which, while being useful, constitutes only a part of the framework that allows the development of critical thinking.
Though services such as Anki, which utilize the forgetting curve framework to encourage learners to remember specific ideas and principles better, work quite well for memorizing specific notions, they can only boost students’ critical thinking once used as a supplementary tool. As a standalone framework, these services represent a rather basic framework for revising material. Since each learner needs an individual approach toward building critical thinking, services such as Anki can only be integrated into the learning process as a minor part of a broader framework that incorporates tasks geared specifically for training critical thinking.
References
Seibert Hanson, A. E., & Brown, C. M. (2020). Enhancing L2 learning through a mobile assisted spaced-repetition tool: An effective but bitter pill? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 33(1-2), 133-155. Web.