The Achievable method
Hi, and welcome!
Achievable is an extremely efficient way of studying, and that’s because we do things differently than other online study programs. Let’s take a few minutes to briefly cover a few points so you can understand how the system works and how to get the most value from your time with us.
The Achievable method
The thing that makes Achievable special is that rather than merely presenting content, we do something called “adaptive learning.” Simply put, this means that as you study with us, the system learns about you and automatically personalizes the study program for your particular strengths and weaknesses. We do this by tracking your progress through the content, recording your quiz responses, and analyzing various data to create a model of your understanding and mastery of the material. At the most basic level, this means that you can more effectively track and visualize your progress, but our model takes it a lot further.
We all know that you’re supposed to review content you’ve learned. We see it in school - daily homework, weekly assignments, and semesterly exams. This is the foundation of “spaced repetition.” As you gain greater mastery over the material, you can remember it for longer and longer periods of time.
A few brilliant scientists (namely Ebbinghaus and Leitner) studied memory and the science of learning extensively, and they figured out that there’s a sweet spot for the ideal time to review - the spot where you refresh your memory the longest, but haven’t yet forgotten any of the information. Of course, even with knowing the theory of it all, it would be near impossible to try to track and calculate this data about your memory by hand. But good news - with a little help from the algorithms we’ve developed using those findings, we’re able to do some pretty amazing things.
The algorithms we’ve created at Achievable can predict, with very high accuracy, when you’ll start to forget previously learned concepts, and then we can schedule a review for that information a little bit beforehand. This results in a major boost to your retention with the smallest amount of time spent - it’s mathematically the most effective way you can possibly study.
In short, we’ve baked a lot of hi-tech learning science into Achievable to help you get the most out of your time. We geek out over this stuff and can get too technical when we talk about it, but the good news is that it all works behind the scenes. All you need to do is focus on the material:
- Read the online textbook content
- Review with our flashcard quizzes
- Let our adaptive learning algorithms do their magic
- View your progress on the dashboard
- Pass the real exam when you’re ready!
Using the site
Your dashboard shows your progress throughout the program and your readiness for the exam.
In Achievable, the key to efficient studying is simple: first, read the content, then periodically review it to ensure it’s fresh in your mind for the exam.
This chart tracks how much of the content you’ve seen. Once you’ve read through a chapter (and that means reading, not just skimming), tap the “Take quiz” button at the bottom to test yourself!
This does a few things:
- It marks the topic as complete on your Dashboard
- It gives you a quiz to help reinforce the content
- It pushes concepts for the topic into your memory model
That last point is important since those concepts will now start showing up as memory-tracked reviews. Once they’re tracked, they’ll show up in your dashboard under memory progress and your upcoming workload.
If a topic doesn’t have quizzes, you’ll see “Mark as complete” instead of the “Take quiz” button.
The color of the blocks serves as an indicator of your memory strength, and you’ll see it change as you continue to study. Over time, you’ll gain mastery of the concepts, and your memory strength will trend upwards, but it’s also completely ok to sometimes have brief dips on trickier topics. It’s expected that you’ll make a few mistakes along the way - it’s a natural part of the learning process.
When you choose to study is completely up to you, though we do recommend that you don’t let too many reviews pile up. If you delay reviews too long, eventually your memory strength will dip to the point that it’s essentially the same as taking the time to re-learn the content from scratch, and we don’t want that.