srs

How to write good prompts

Found a good blog post about creating good prompts.

  • Retrieval practice prompts should be focused. ... one detail at a time
  • Retrieval practice prompts should be precise about what they’re asking for. Vague questions will elicit vague answers, which won’t reliably light the bulbs you’re targeting.
  • Retrieval practice prompts should produce consistent answers, lighting the same bulbs each time you perform the task. Otherwise, you may run afoul of an interference phenomenon called retrieval-induced forgetting. This effect has been produced in many experiments but is not yet well understood. For an overview, see Murayama et al, Forgetting as a consequence of retrieval: a meta-analytic review of retrieval-induced forgetting (2014).: what you remember during practice is reinforced, but other related knowledge which you didn’t recall is actually inhibited.
  • Retrieval practice prompts should be tractable. you should strive to write prompts which you can almost always answer correctly. This often means breaking the task down, or adding cues.
  • Retrieval practice prompts should be effortful.

Factual Prompt: What type of chicken parts are used in stock? -> Bones.

Explanation Prompt: Why do we use bones to make chicken stock? -> They’re full of gelatin, which produces a rich texture.

more precise: How do bones produce a chicken stock’s rich texture? -> They’re full of gelatin.

Lists

Grouping: Chicken stock is made with chicken, water, and what other category of ingredients? -> Aromatics.

Missing Element: Typical chicken stock aromatics:

  • ???
  • carrots
  • celery
  • garlic
  • parsley

A: Onion

Tip: keep the list in the same order [visual “shape”].

Most spaced repetition software has a special function which can rapidly generate sets of fill-in-the-blank prompts like this. In the software interfaces, these prompts are often called “cloze deletions.” In each review session, the software will only ask you to fill in one blank. This behavior is important because without it, one variant would “give away” the answer to another.

explaination prompt: Why is carrot a good aromatic for chicken stock? -> A quick answer: carrot provides vegetal sweetness; like salt, this sugar brightens other flavors.

elaborative encoding: Typical chicken stock aromatics:

  • onion
  • carrots
  • celery
  • garlic
  • ??? (herb)

A. Parsley

bad: gives away too much: Typical chicken stock aromatics:

  • onion
  • ??? (rhymes with parrots)
  • celery
  • garlic
  • parsley

A. Carrots

elaborative encoding: Typical chicken stock aromatics

  • onion
  • ???
  • celery
  • garlic
  • parsley

A. carrots (rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock)

prompt to Mnemonic: Mnemonic device for carrots in chicken stock? -> rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock

Notice how I’ve broken the ingredient list down into many questions here, each focused and precise. I’ve noticed that people often feel a compulsion to economize on the number of prompts they write. Prompts seem to carry a per-unit “price,” so people naturally try to write fewer questions which cover more ground. But that’s counter-productive. Unless you explicitly decide to exclude certain information, the number of “units of raw knowledge” is fixed, a constant of the territory. When you write coarser prompts in smaller quantity, you’re not reducing the amount you have to learn. You’re just making the material harder to review.

write more prompts than feels natural.