Concept dependency tracking

Concept dependency tracking (there might be a more standard term) refers to the tracking of conceptual dependencies (e.g. using a dependency DAG) when learning a subject.

"Every time you encounter a concept you don’t recognize, you need to go back and learn it first. Pretty soon you’re deep in dependency hell, switching between twenty tabs, trying to juggle all the prerequisites of prerequisites, wondering if any of this will actually help you towards your original goal." [1]

The paper "Retain: Building a Concept Recommendation System that Leverages Spaced Repetition to Improve Retention in Educational Settings" by Shilpa Subrahmanyam also talks about this.

[2] uses a "current list" to track the current concept plus its dependencies.

In software engineering, the idea of dependencies is used frequently, e.g.

• Package managers for programming languages and Linux distributions
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_(computer_programming)
• Tracing up and down layers of abstraction in object-oriented programming, tracing function calls