Ace
Short answer: let the textbook tell you what matters. Card the chapter's learning objectives, its bold key terms and its end-of-chapter questions, and skip most of the rest. Read a section first, close the book, then write cards from what you understood, phrased as questions that make you explain or apply an idea. Keep all the chapter's cards in one deck and review them over several days.
What should you put on flashcards from a textbook?
Textbooks are written for many courses at once, so a single chapter may hold three times what your exam covers. Before you write a single card, look for the signals the authors have already left you:
- Learning objectives. The list at the start of the chapter ("By the end of this chapter you should be able to...") is the closest thing to an exam brief. Each objective should end up as at least one card, usually in the same verb it uses: if it says "explain", your card asks you to explain.
- Bold or highlighted key terms. These are the vocabulary of the topic. Card the ones your course uses, but ask for more than a definition where you can: "How does X differ from Y?" rather than "Define X".
- End-of-chapter questions and summaries. Review questions are ready-made cards, and they show you the kind of thinking the authors expect. The summary tells you which ideas they consider central.
- Figures, tables and worked examples. A labelled diagram or a key table often carries more exam weight than the paragraphs around it.
- Your syllabus. If your lecturer only covered sections 4.1 to 4.4, the rest of chapter 4 can wait.
What to leave out: historical asides, case boxes you were not asked to read, and every sentence that merely restates a heading. If you would not be surprised to see it on the exam, it gets a card. If you would, it probably does not.
When should you make the cards?
After you understand a section, not while you are reading it for the first time. Writing cards with the book open turns into copying, which feels busy but involves little thinking. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), reviewing ten common study techniques, rated highlighting and rereading as low utility because they do not consistently boost performance, and recommended practice testing in their place. Copying sentences onto cards is a close cousin of highlighting.
A better rhythm for each section:
- Read the section once, properly, looking for the main idea.
- Close the book and say or jot down what it was about.
- Write the cards from that, in your own words. Then open the book and check your answers, fixing anything you got wrong.
If you cannot write a card without looking, that is useful information: you have not understood that part yet, so reread it before carding it. This is the same read-then-recall idea behind the SQ3R method, which is worth using for the reading itself. And if your textbook is a PDF on a screen, our guide to studying from a PDF covers reading it actively.
What kind of cards work best?
Question-style cards that make you produce an answer. A front that reads "Osmosis" invites a vague nod; a front that reads "Why does a red blood cell swell in pure water?" makes you work out the answer.
This matters for exams because exam questions rarely repeat the textbook's wording. Pan and Rickard (2018), in a meta-analysis covering 192 effect sizes from 122 experiments, found that practice testing produced learning that transferred to new questions (d = 0.40), with transfer greatest to application and inference questions. They also found that elaborated retrieval practice made positive transfer more likely. In card terms: include "why", "how" and "what would happen if" cards, not just definitions.
Useful card types for textbook material:
- Explain: "Explain why..." in two or three sentences.
- Compare: "How does X differ from Y?" for terms that sit side by side in the chapter.
- Order: "Put the stages of... in order" for any process.
- Apply: "A patient/company/reaction does X. What happens next, and why?"
- Objective cards: the learning objective itself, turned into a question.
More rules for writing the cards are in how to make good flashcards.
What does this look like for one chapter?
Take a 30-page biology chapter on membrane transport. A copying approach might produce a hundred cards, one per bold word and sentence. A selective approach looks more like this:
- One or two cards per learning objective ("Explain how the sodium-potassium pump maintains the resting membrane potential").
- Compare cards for the bold terms that are easy to confuse (diffusion versus facilitated diffusion versus active transport).
- An order card for each process the chapter walks through step by step.
- A label card for the main membrane diagram.
- The end-of-chapter review questions your course actually covers, as written.
That is a smaller deck, but every card is one you would expect to need, and none is a sentence you could answer by recognising the wording.
How should you review textbook flashcards?
Most of the benefit comes from how you use the cards, not from making them.
- Answer from memory first. Every time, before you turn the card over.
- Keep one big deck per chapter. Kornell (2009) found that studying one large stack of flashcards was more effective than studying the same cards in four smaller stacks, because the larger stack spaces each card further apart. Spacing beat massing for 90% of participants, yet after the first session 72% believed massing had worked better.
- Spread reviews over days. In a survey of 374 undergraduates, Wissman, Rawson and Pyc (2012) found that students generally did not space their flashcard practice or understand the benefit of longer gaps. Plan to see each chapter's deck again on several separate days before the exam; our spaced repetition schedule sets out the timings.
- Mix chapters near the exam. Once you have several decks, shuffle them together so you have to work out which topic each question belongs to.
If your textbook is a PDF or an ePub, Ace can turn it into practice questions written only from the book, and you pick which chapters to study, so you can match the questions to what your course covers. Each answer shows the sentence from the book that backs it.
Frequently asked questions
How many flashcards should I make per textbook chapter?
There is no right number. Start from the learning objectives, key terms and review questions, and add cards only for ideas you would expect to be examined. A smaller deck you review properly beats a huge one you never finish.
Should I copy definitions straight from the textbook?
For exact technical definitions your course requires word for word, yes. For everything else, write the answer in your own words after closing the book, then check it.
Is it better to make flashcards while reading or after?
After each section. Making cards while reading for the first time tends to become copying. Read, close the book, recall, then write.
What if my textbook has no learning objectives?
Use the section headings as questions ("What is X and why does it matter?"), plus the chapter summary and any review questions. Your course outline or past papers can fill the same role.
Sources
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Pan, S. C., & Rickard, T. C. (2018). Transfer of test-enhanced learning: Meta-analytic review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 144(7), 710–756.
- Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.
- Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2012). How and when do students use flashcards? Memory, 20(6), 568–579.
