We'd wager that millions of students use flashcards every day. In survey research of student study strategies, more than 20% of K-12 students and 50% of college students report using flashcards.

But do students use flashcards effectively? Not necessarily. Here are three tips from Powerful Teaching to make flashcards more powerful (use the mnemonic "lather, rinse, repeat" to help you remember).

1) Retrieve: Students should make sure they are retrieving the answer. Write down the answer or say it out loud before flipping the card over.

2) Re-order: Students should shuffle their deck each time they go through it to challenge themselves with spacing and interleaving.

3) Repeat: Students should keep cards in their deck until they’ve correctly retrieved it three times. Just because a student retrieved an item once doesn’t mean they “get it.”