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目录 Cloze and its traps

Making material learnable

Cloze and its traps

A cloze is a sentence with a missing part that the learner must supply.1 Woźniak recommends cloze deletion as a fast way to turn existing text into prompts,1 but speed of authoring is not the same as quality of retrieval. The practical judgement is to inspect what information remains visible and ask whether it supplies the answer you intended to retrieve.

Cloze mechanics can change the task substantially. In Anki, different deletion markers create separate cards, while the same marker can hide several spans together. Deletions may leave letters visible inside a word, and explicit hints can replace hidden text.2

Design choice What it changes Practical response
Several spans share a marker The card requires several answers together.2 Split separately assessable targets.
Initial or final letters remain The visible spelling narrows the answer.2 Hide the whole target when full production matters.
An explicit hint replaces the span The hint changes retrieval difficulty.2 Keep it only when that cue belongs in the intended task.

The amount of cueing matters. Replicated word-retrieval experiments found better later memory after practice with fewer letter cues than after practice with more letter cues, including when item difficulty was controlled.3 Replicated experiments with brief passages also found larger later-memory benefits from free recall than from cued recall or recognition under their tested conditions.4 That comparison was partly confounded because free recall allowed retrieval of the whole passage while the other tests requested only portions.4

With a deck and twenty minutes a day, pause when a cloze is answered from exposed letters or a familiar hint rather than from the intended knowledge. Hide the complete target, rewrite the sentence as a direct question, or split multiple missing spans. The aim is not maximum difficulty. It is a prompt that requires the retrieval you actually care about.

Boundary. Experiments establish that cue amount can affect later memory. They do not establish that sentence clozes are generally better or worse than ordinary question-and-answer cards. This cloze workflow is a reasonable procedure built on retrieval findings, not itself a settled finding, and no universal amount of surrounding context has been validated.

参考文献

  1. [1]Woźniak on cloze deletion
  2. [2]Anki cloze editing documentation
  3. [3]Letter cues and later word retrieval
  4. [4]Recall practice with brief passages
测验

  1. A cloze should test production of a complete term, but its first and final letters remain visible. What is the best redesign?

    • Hide the entire target and require full production
    • Keep the letters and add a category hint
    • Reveal more letters and shorten the sentence

    Visible letters directly narrow the spelling, so hiding the full target better matches the intended production task.

  2. Using the same deletion marker for several spans makes the card require ____.

    • multiple answers at once
    • one answer with context
    • recognition without retrieval

    Spans sharing a deletion marker are hidden together, turning the cloze into a bundled multi-answer prompt.

  3. A learner wants to recall a drug name when given its therapeutic use. A cloze shows the use and hides the entire drug name. This card matches the intended retrieval task.

    • True
    • False

    The therapeutic use is the intended cue, while the complete drug name remains the information the learner must retrieve.

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