hey friends in this video i'm going to be talking to you about the best method for studying anything
that's a big claim so i'm going to stack that up with some evidence and proof as well
video's going to have three sections first of all we're going to take a look at the ways
that you're probably revising now these are the most common ways that students like to revise
and i'm going to break down why these probably are not the best ways next i'm going to introduce you
to the holy grail of revision techniques and talk to you about why that works lastly we're
going to talk about how you can integrate this method into practical steps that you can take
so we're going to talk about how you can use these methods to get better results in eurovision
i really hope that everyone watching is going to watch the whole way through and you're going
to take some of these points and you're going to include them in your studying so you get better
results i would really appreciate a little like and maybe even a comment if you found this video
useful remember you can subscribe and then you get notified whenever i upload one of these new
videos it's going to be a bit of a new section on the channel as a medical student i have to revise
a lot and so i spent a lot of time kind of working out what works for me and doing a bit of research
about what works for everyone so you can expect a few more of these videos just like this coming up
soon sorry to tell you but the way you're studying is just not cutting it everyone has their own way
of studying we're all individuals we all learn in our own ways and if you're watching this video
maybe you just started a new course maybe you're a student and you're feeling like there's no exam
that's coming up it really matters and i need to do well and so am i revising well enough i just
don't know maybe you're just bored of whatever you're currently doing i would say almost every
single student that i've ever spoken to at least and probably in the world oh that's a very big
claim is going to be doing one of these two methods of revision either creating and writing
notes or reading textbooks and highlighting them now i can very safely say that there have been
big periods of my life when these two methods were the only thing i did when i was revising
probably right the way up to the end of my first year of university to be honest
those i would say were the two things that i did the majority of the time when i was revising
i might be in the library or in my room or in a coffee shop and i would be watching a
lecture online and writing down some notes only to them never look at those notes again creating
and reading notes now in university or college if you're in the states this is definitely the
most commonly used revision technique this is the way that almost everyone is going to be studying
students will attend a lecture or you know these days they'll be watching a lecture online
and they'll create some fairly detailed notes about everything that the lecturer has said that
might be important now if you're a really good student you may even finish that lecture and
the same night a couple weeks later have a look over those long extensive lecture notes that you
took and rewrite some of them maybe to kind of highlight some of the most important things to
focus in on some of those key facts that you need to remember however there are several issues with
this reversion technique of just kind of creating and writing notes first of all those notes you're
taking they're almost definitely too detailed and too extensive and there is no way you can remember
them unless you're someone with a photographic memory and if you are i'm sorry i hate you because
that's just not fair at the same time those notes you've made they've relied on you listening
and paying attention while writing and so even though they're too detailed and too extensive
you've probably also missed some key information in there this is not to say that you shouldn't be
making notes please don't leave this video storm off and go and burn all your notes to the ground
but this should not be your revision technique revision and studying that is taking that
information and implanting it somewhere in your brain so that you can access it no to great but
notes are only the start of a far more effective way of learning the second way and probably the
most common thing you'll see anyone doing if you go into a university library is reading
and highlighting either lecture notes textbooks or your own notes to be fair this is better than just
having written the notes and then never looking at them again and highlighting you're incorporating
some something physical that you're doing you're incorporating some color and those are definitely
good it's probably not working as well as you think it is though don't get me wrong highlighting
your notes and creating those notes in the first place they're not awful they definitely have their
place in this perfect studying workflow but they're not working as well as you think and
you need to be honest with yourself okay studying this is something you're doing for yourself and so
you need to be honest with yourself about how well it's working highlighting information does nothing
to pick the information up and put it in your brain yes it looks pretty afterwards and yes
if you then went back a third time to look at that page you might be more easily able to see
which bits of information you cared about when you went through and highlighted
personally in a medical textbook if i try and highlight important information i end up with
a full page of highlights but no matter how pretty the page looks that information is well and truly
still stuck onto the page and not stuck in my brain i told you that whatever it is you're doing
probably isn't working so well and hopefully i haven't crushed your dreams too much but what
do i propose you do instead under section two repetition is king okay say it again repetition
is king the secret to remembering anything it's really simple repetition so by getting information
repeatedly putting it into your brain and then repeatedly extracting that information from your
neurons by testing yourself for example that is the best way to cement knowledge inside your head
to make it stick for pretty much forever as long as you keep doing a few reps every now and then
and this is the secret to studying anything let's have a little bit of an analogy
training your brain it's just like training your body no one expects to go into a gym do one squat
a deadlift two pull-ups go home have a single healthy meal sit back and go yep
that's me done i'm now hench learning is not any different do you want big muscles or six-pack abs
you've got to get your reps in learning just the same don't treat it any differently
you want to keep that information in your head you've got to get your reps in if i want to
remember something forever indefinitely or more likely in most people's case if i want to learn
information long enough and be able to access it in an exam i need to get my repetitions in
so multiple studies have found that repetition is one of the best ways of retaining information
i'm going to link a few of those down below because i think it's important that you
don't just take my word for that you need to go and have a look at the information yourself
so it's not procrastination this counts as learning go down have a look at those
links have a look at some of those studies this retrieval based learning method so where you're
putting information in your head and then you're teaching yourself and and you're testing yourself
by retrieving that information again this has been shown to be the most effective way of learning
anything retrieval practice has also been shown to improve a student's ability to make inferences
between information learning something better means that you can use that information better
anyone who's particularly perceptive may notice there's a little bit of a change of scenery here
i was living down in ashford at william harvey hospital in kent for my pediatric placement
but that's finished now and it's almost christmas so i've moved back into my family home apologies
that that's taking place in the middle of filming a video but what can we do at 2020 life is just
full of upsets now that we know the theory behind better studying and more effective studying it's
time to put that into practice and i mean practice because that's what learning really is technique
number one is flash cards and active recall if you know me then you know i'm a recent but a very
staunch convert to flashcards i only started using flashcards in my second year of uni but instantly
i saw big results personally i think it's much more important how you're using these flashcards
more than whether you've written them yourself or downloaded a deck from someone else i tend to make
my own but that's because i can then tailor them more to my learning style i can decide how much
pictures or how little pictures i want to put in there and also i get complete control over what
platform i'm doing them on what we're using these flash cards for is active recall we want to have
a flash card that gives us a prompt on the front of the card if it's a physical card or you know
in the header if it's a virtual card and then we want to be dredging up as much anatomy physiology
information about the condition as we can for that particular prompt this recall of information this
needs to be done unguided so all you've got is the information on that prompt this is one
of flashcard's biggest strengths is that you're testing yourself but you're testing yourself by
yourself this only needs you and your set of flash cards and you've got an amazing revision technique
i've really changed where i've made my flash cards over the years initially i made them in this
the first app i found on the app store that was called chegg which was a big mistake to be honest
because i can't export directly any of my flash cards i made in there all of the several thousand
i then had to go at making physical ones but i found that they just ended up in the bottom of
my bag my laptop went on top of them they all got torn up and crooked i'm now using notion to make
my flash cards the most popular way that anyone makes flash cards in medical school is of course
anki you can't really be a medical student without having heard anki thrown about all over the place
i've only very recently started using anki and for me i can see its strengths i just
don't know if it's the right kind of platform or software for me anki's biggest strength is
what we're moving on to next and that's spaced repetition technique number two space repetition
space repetition is the practice of leaving planned and increasing gaps in between testing
yourself on a particular piece of information by increasing this time and by remembering to revisit
everything at some point you're able to actually remember anything indefinitely anki flash cards
make this incredibly easy they do this very well depending on whether you've got a question right
or wrong it will give you the question again in a certain amount of time but i've also found a way
to do this on me and i think everyone's favorite productivity app notion if you're interested
in learning about how i use space repetition using coding inside of notion then please leave
a comment below and i'll make another video all about that absolutely anything can be learnt using
space repetition it doesn't have to be medicine it doesn't have to be from flash cards even
if you're learning a new language for example make sure you revisit the basics as often as possible
make sure you keep using the language rather than having a long period of time where you're
not using it and you'll find that your memory for that language really dramatically increases
technique number three we've been talking about repetition we've been talking about reps and
that wouldn't be complete without talking about questions questions are a fantastic way of making
you find those connections inside of your head fire up those neurons and pull the information
out you will not talk to a single senior medical student who's done well in their exams who hasn't
used questions and question banks as a huge part of their revision in order to answer a question we
need to actively and repeatedly access information inside of our brains the important part i'm going
to add here which i think some people don't do and i've definitely fallen foul of myself
is you need to repeat everything okay you don't do these questions once and you don't only repeat the
questions you've got wrong you repeat all of them regularly i've definitely fallen into this trap
you know you think you know something and so you don't revise it and then you come up to the exam
and you end up doing worst in the part that you thought you were strongest at
because that's the part you haven't revisited my physics as levels and physics a level was
just like this i thought i was going to get a fantastic grade and so i didn't revise physics
much when it came to my final a level exams which was very stupid and it meant that i got a d in my
last exams for it and so i got a b overall don't make the same mistakes as me let me make them for
you revise everything even the things you think are easy i hope you found this brief but hopefully
interesting guide to studying effectively useful i'm planning on this being quite a regular section
on this channel so i'm going to expand the content of the videos as my own learning expands and we'll
try and talk about the other techniques that i use in my revision as i said i've been using
flash cards with space repetition and active recall in notion using a little bit of code
and if you're interested in that then please leave a comment below and we can talk all about how to
do that yourself the next video in this series is going to be about making notes in medical school
and how i go from lecture slides to notes and then to flash cards make sure you press the little bell
next to the subscribe button that you've already pressed and you'll get notified when that video
gets uploaded that way you can be among the first to watch and the first to get ahead in medical
school