← Praesto LogicaCompany · pedagogy

The pedagogy under the hood

Four ideas from cognitive science that shaped how Praesto works. All paraphrased; sources at the bottom of the page.

Four principles

Retrieval practice beats re-reading

Pulling information out of memory builds long-term retention more effectively than reviewing it passively. This is the single most replicated finding in the learning-science literature.

Praesto's core daily loop is not 'open your notes and read them' — it's a short stack of recall questions generated from your recent lectures. The lecture transcript is there if you want it, but the default action is to try to answer.

Roediger and Karpicke, 2006 · Karpicke and Blunt, 2011

Spacing beats cramming

Reviews scheduled with increasing gaps between them produce far better long-term retention than the same total time spent in one session. The forgetting curve from Ebbinghaus's 1885 self-experiments has held up under modern replication.

Praesto schedules every flashcard using FSRS, an open-source spaced-repetition algorithm. Each card's next review date is computed from the student's answer history, not from a fixed interval. Cards the student finds easy stretch quickly; cards they find hard come back sooner.

Ebbinghaus, 1885 · Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer, 2006 · Ye, 2022 (FSRS)

Desirable difficulties

Conditions that make learning feel harder in the moment — varied practice, spaced practice, retrieval practice — often produce better long-term retention than smoother conditions that feel easier. Students' in-the-moment judgments of how well they're learning are systematically wrong.

Praesto deliberately mixes question types and topics rather than blocking by chapter, and it does not let the student silently mark a card 'I knew it' without trying to recall the answer first. The friction is the feature.

Bjork and Bjork, 2011

Handwritten notes are processed differently than typed ones

When students take notes longhand, they tend to summarize and rephrase in ways that produce better conceptual understanding than verbatim transcription on a laptop, even when the typed notes are longer.

Praesto encourages handwritten notes on the iPad with Apple Pencil and captures them as first-class content alongside the transcript — not as a fallback for people who don't type fast enough. The student's marginalia and diagrams become anchors for the AI-generated review questions.

Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014

Closing

None of this is novel. The contribution Praesto tries to make is engineering, not science: take findings that have been sitting in journals for decades and put them in front of a student in the form of a tool they will actually open every day. The references below are the load-bearing studies; we recommend the Roediger and Karpicke 2006 paper as the single best place to start.

References

  1. Roediger, H. L., III, and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
  2. Karpicke, J. D., and Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772–775.doi: 10.1126/science.1199327
  3. Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie. Duncker and Humblot, Leipzig. English translation by Ruger and Bussenius, 1913, Teachers College, Columbia University.
  4. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., and Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
  5. Bjork, E. L., and Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher et al. (Eds.), Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.
  6. Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581
  7. Ye, J. (2022). FSRS: A Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler. Open-source algorithm and reference implementation.https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki
  8. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g; implementing regulations at 34 CFR Part 99.https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-A/part-99
  9. AICPA. Trust Services Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy.https://www.aicpa-cima.com/topic/audit-assurance/audit-and-assurance-greater-than-soc-2