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A student in my intro Religions of the World class recently asked—well, more like desperately pleaded—to be able to use a 3x5 notecard on the final exam. I said “maybe,” but it was the kind of “maybe” that parents say when they want to get kids off their back and hope the kids forget about it later. I was, to put it mildly, pretty resistant to the idea. I worried it would mean that students wouldn’t study as hard, offloading what should be stored in their brains onto a piece of paper that would just be discarded. Isn’t notecard usage basically just a professor-sanctioned form of cheating–or, at least, a professor-sanctioned form of “don’t worry about learning anything”? Are students just trying to find any and all shortcuts to the actual difficult labor of learning? What is this world coming to?? (I’ve officially turned old and “kids-these-days”-y.)But I had promised to consider her request and I didn’t really want to be the person who my daughter always accuses me of being—the person whose “maybe” really just always means “no.”One morning, after waking up at 3:20am and not being able to fall back asleep (WHY), I decided to actually look up research on notecard usage. Why I didn’t think to do this before forming my opinion about the usage of notecards is beyond me. As you might expect, if you’re familiar with research on education and pedagogy, research is mixed.Some studies have shown that students using notecards outperform peers who don’t. But even studies in which performance isn’t obviously better do show that the use of notecards can alleviate student anxiety and may reduce the temptation to cheat. For me, the bit about alleviating stress was actually the most important. I’m trying to instill in students a love, maybe even an appreciation, of the subject matter–not permanently repel them from the study of religion. Anxiety was certainly what was leading my student to make the request in the first place. She was overwhelmed by the amount of material in a 101 survey course and not at all feeling confident about her ability to do well on the final exam. If I could help ease her mind a bit, why not?But also: the articles I reviewed brought up a good point, which is that the creation of the notecards is itself a form of studying or a good study habit. That is, students have to gather, review, and synthesize a bunch of different information to discern what ultimately goes into the notecard. That the actual making of the notecard helps them to learn the material. Okay, sold.So, I went in the next day and told my students they could use notecards for the final exam. We’ll see how it goes.