Flashcards

Here at Study Skills we appreciate how hard it can be to start revising for exams. Even after you have dragged yourself away from all the distractions around you and settled down to your work, it can be intimidating to see a pile of paper covered in notes or a dense textbook full of words words words. What is the answer?

Small is beautiful.

Information looks less scary when it arrives in several small packages rather than one big one. And this can be achieved when revising by using flashcards. Flashcards are very helpful and easy both to use and to create. All you need to do is break down whatever you need to revise into small parts and put each part onto a separate flashcard.



For example if you were a midwife studying the stages of pregnancy you could create flashcards detailing each stage and your role within it, or if you are an English student studying Jane Eyre you could break the book down into a flashcard for each chapter, or a flashcard for each theme within the book.

Making the flashcards will require you to think about the subject, decide what information to put on each card, rephrasing it to fit in some cases, and this is excellent revision work in itself – you are thinking about your notes and reading, rather than just mindlessly copying it out. This aids memory as you are actively engaging with the material rather than just acting like a human photocopier.

Organising your flashcards

Of course flashcards need to be organised carefully, otherwise you’ll have a room full of seemingly unconnected pieces of paper, or a computer hard drive full of small files scattered across numerous folders. If you are using paper flashcards get yourself a file to store the flashcards in – you can even buy specific flashcard boxes. Use different coloured paper, or big labels to indicate different modules or subjects. Use different boxes. Do whatever it takes but stay on top of your flashcards, they can easily run out of control and it’s entirely up to you to show your organisational skills to keep them in a usable order.

A similar rule applies to using electronic flashcards, keep track of them using folders and don’t let them overwhelm you. Also, if they are important or you spend a long time working on them it is wise to make a back up set – your computer could crash and you could lose all your carefully assembled flashcards.

If you want to have your flashcards on your computer you might want to consider using a flashcard website. Flashcard website have advantages over regular paper or word file flashcards as they can be stored online and used on any computer, they don’t take up as much space as paper, and some website offer some interesting and even fun opportunities for your flashcards.

Take Quizlet.



Quizlet is a nice, well designed website which allows you to make flashcard sets, search the flashcard sets made by others, and turn the flashcards you make/find into quizzes. To create a flashcard you simply write a “term” and a “definition” to go with it. You can use this to connect names, technical terms, theories or even pictures to their definitions. Take a look at the links below to see some flashcard sets which are already on the website.

European capital cities.
State flags of American states.
Basic function graphs.

Each set has a link to a set of quizzes and online games you can play with the flashcards which may help you learn the terms faster.

There are other flashcard websites out there, Quizlet might not be for everyone, so take a look and see what there is and what suits your learning style the best. If you see any websites you think are particularly good please leave a comment or email us at studyskills@salford.ac.uk and we’ll take a look.