3toGo
Research
3toGo asks 3 quick questions every time you reach for a feed. That design comes from four well-studied ideas: answering beats rereading, spreading practice out beats cramming, a short pause changes what you do next, and habits stick to cues you already have.
3toGo itself hasn’t been studied yet. The studies below test the methods it’s built on, and each one says what it did and didn’t show.
10 unlocks a day × 3 questions = 30 a day ≈ 10,950 a year
Simple arithmetic, not a study: what a few questions at a time adds up to.
01 · Retrieval practice
Swahili words still remembered a week later, when students kept being tested on them compared with when testing stopped after the first correct answer.
College students learned 40 Swahili–English word pairs. Those who kept being tested on words they had already recalled remembered about 80% a week later; those who stopped being tested remembered 33 to 36%. More restudy added essentially nothing.
Karpicke & Roediger (2008), Science. doi:10.1126/science.1152408
Across 159 effects from 61 studies, testing beat an equal amount of restudy (g = 0.50). The benefit was bigger with feedback (0.73 vs 0.39) and at delays of a day or more. It was smaller when the practice test was recognition, which includes multiple choice.
Rowland (2014), Psychological Bulletin (meta-analysis). doi:10.1037/a0037559
In a lab study using history passages, multiple-choice quizzes helped students recall the answers a week later. Showing the correct answer, right after each question or at the end of the quiz, made the gain bigger and cut how often wrong options were later remembered as right.
Butler & Roediger (2008), Memory & Cognition. doi:10.3758/MC.36.3.604
In 3toGo: every unlock is 3 multiple-choice questions to answer, not a card to read. You see right away if you got it, a miss shows you the right answer, and the same question stays until you pick it.
02 · Spacing
Average recall after spaced versus back-to-back study, across 271 comparisons from 254 lab studies of verbal memory.
Across 317 experiments in 184 articles, spreading repetitions of the same items apart led to better recall than presenting them back to back. Only 12 of 271 comparisons showed no benefit or the reverse.
Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006), Psychological Bulletin (review and synthesis). doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
Across 48 second-language experiments (3,411 learners), spaced practice had a medium-to-large advantage over massed practice, and longer gaps did better on delayed tests.
Kim & Webb (2022), Language Learning (meta-analysis). doi:10.1111/lang.12479
In a real eighth-grade Spanish course, vocabulary reviewed on a personalised spacing schedule was remembered better on a cumulative exam 28 days after the semester than vocabulary reviewed only within the current chapter.
Lindsey, Shroyer, Pashler & Mozer (2014), Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797613504302
In 3toGo: questions arrive a few at a time across the day, whenever a feed gets opened. A missed word comes back in later sets until it’s been answered right three times. Those repeats are often minutes or hours apart, and the studies above found longer gaps did better on delayed tests, so this is only a partial match.
03 · A pause before the feed
A self-nudge app that paused chosen apps for 10 seconds: share of opening attempts people abandoned, and the fall in attempts over six weeks.
280 new users who kept an app that adds a 10-second pause before chosen apps open for all six weeks closed the app after the pause on 36% of attempts, and by week six tried to open those apps 37% less often than in their first week with it. There was no control group, and people who stopped using the app were left out. A separate online experiment with 500 people in the same paper found a time delay also cut how often people watched viral video clips.
Grüning, Riedel & Lorenz-Spreen (2023), PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.2213114120
Logs from 1,039 users over an average of 13.4 weeks showed daily attempts to open the targeted apps falling over time, with people giving up on 33% of attempts.
Haliburton, Grüning, Riedel, Schmidt & Terzimehić (2024), CHI ’24. doi:10.1145/3613904.3642370
Apple Screen Time data from 238 iPhone users showed about 86 pickups a day. Their own estimates averaged about 46.
Ellis, Davidson, Shaw & Geyer (2019), International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.05.004
In 3toGo: the pause is the lesson. Instead of a timer, the moment someone reaches for a feed becomes 3 Spanish questions. These studies measure phone use, not learning.
04 · Habits and cues
Effect of “if this happens, then I’ll do that” plans on reaching goals, compared with just intending to.
People who planned exactly when, where and how they would act reached their goals more often than people who only intended to, with a medium-to-large average effect across 94 tests.
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (meta-analysis). doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
Volunteers repeated one self-chosen eating, drinking or exercise habit in the same context for 12 weeks. How automatic it felt rose along a curve that levelled off, with the estimated time to get close to that plateau ranging from 18 to 254 days, and missing one day didn’t materially set people back.
Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts & Wardle (2010), European Journal of Social Psychology. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674
A review of habit research argues that habits form gradually as an action is repeatedly paired with something in its context, like a place or a preceding action, until the context alone sets the action off.
Wood & Neal (2007), Psychological Review (theory and review). doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
In 3toGo: you don’t need to remember to start a lesson. 3toGo shows up when you open a feed, which works like an if-then plan: if I open Instagram, then I answer 3 Spanish questions. In these studies people made the plan themselves, so this is a comparison, not a tested result.
What this doesn’t show
Most retrieval and spacing studies are lab studies with word lists or short texts, not months of real classes. 3toGo’s questions are multiple choice, and in Rowland’s meta-analysis recognition tests like multiple choice helped less than recall. The self-nudge studies had no control group and measured phone use, not learning. And 3toGo has not been tested in a study of its own.
If you’d like to run one with your students, I’d love to help: [email protected].
References