Item

Item in SuperMemo is a piece of knowledge that a student wants to remember. It is usually an equivalent of a flashcard. For example:

Question: Which year did Copernicus die?
Answer: 1543

An item may be a simple question with an answer, or a cloze deletion, or a spelling test, or more general stimulus-response pair. Items in SuperMemo for Windows are denoted with a blue L-plate icon.

In incremental reading, items can be generated on a massive scale with cloze deletion tools (usually with a single keystroke).

Items should be distinguished from topics which are learning materials intended for passive review or processing (e.g. articles from the web). Items are subject to active recall while topics are the prime source of new items. A set of items in SuperMemo is called a collection.

Alternative names in other applications: card, question, and more.

This glossary entry is used to explain SuperMemo, a pioneer of spaced repetition software since 1987