How to Study More Effectively and Pass Your Medical Exams

How to study more effectively is an important topic for many junior doctors.

Many junior doctors who visit us tend to study for long hours to absorb the material then get frustrated when they can't recall that important fact or process. They know they read it not long ago, and they are hyper-aware that forgetting is a costly mistake because it could be in the exam, and everything's riding on this.

How do study effectively involves

1. understanding why you forget, and 
2. then using study techniques that dampen the forgetting curve to make sure that what you learn sticks. 

Some common study methods that doctors use

Most people don't know how to study effectively.

We know that this is a bold statement to make, given that junior doctors have largely aced every exam they have taken.

For junior doctors, there are large swathes of reading each day to get through your exams. The volume is quite different from high school and medical school, where exams are nearly always on the semester just finished.

Are re-reading medical books an effective study method for doctors?

When we ask the doctors we work with how they study at home, many tell us that they re-read their books and make copious notes. But when we ask, "Is this the best way to retain and apply the information?" they often tell us they don't know.

The answer is no.

While re-reading increases the total amount of information encoded and helps with processing the ideas to increase the memory of a topic, it doesn't help you apply and evaluate the content that's so necessary for your exams and your profession as a doctor.

The crucial piece here is what you do with the information when you re-read your textbooks. 

Is the highlighter strategy a good study technique for doctors?

Some doctors point out that they adopt the highlighting strategy for essential points of information.

Highlighting has some crucial functions. It helps a written word pop out, which can be helpful when you want to come back to the essential points.

However, it is likely to fall over for junior doctors due to the large quantity of material you need to cover. Each chapter and paragraph is packed with information, and the consequence is that you may find that you have highlighted large sections of content.

When we ask, "Is this a good way to learn important concepts?" again, they say they don't know.

This is what we mean by “most people have not been shown how to study”.

The consequence of using outdated study methods is that you are likely to be studying for long hours.

How to study more effectively: Flattening the Forgetting Curve

How to study more effectively for a doctor involves a number of components, but one important part is developing learning strategies that stick. This involves flattening the forgetting curve. 

What is the forgetting curve

You're probably more familiar with forgetting than you think. Was it Alexander the Great who won the battle of Issus in Southern Anatolia? What was Macbeth angry about in Shakespeare's play? What are the first few numbers in the pi formulation, how do we use that to calculate the circumference of a circle?

All these things we learned in high school, but their answers now elude us, even after studying half our lives in these areas. This is a universal experience because we all forget, and you can plot the rate you forget with the forgetting curve.

The forgetting curve refers to the rate of loss of new information over time. The graph below shows the rate of forgetting and that memories weaken over time. If we learn something new and then don't take any time to relearn that information, we remember less.

The Forgetting Curve has implications on your study strategy.

The earliest research done on this was by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus way back in the 1880s, who produced the forgetting curve. His research is still widely used and highly regarded. A research team in 2015 reproduced his findings and found that his methods and theories still hold.

Two Strategies to Make Your Study Stick

How to study more effectively for a doctor starts with adopting strategies that make content stick. Here are two such strategies.

#1 Spacing your learning to make content stick

Spaced learning, also known as distributed practice, involves reviewing information over several periods rather than all at once.

I like to think of spaced learning as building the brick wall at the front of his house. If I lay the bricks in a rush and don't let the mortar between each brick dry, my front wall will not be very good quality.

What spaced learning does is allow the mental mortar time to dry.

While there are many mechanisms by which spacing benefits long-term retention, a key one is that spacing allows your brain to consolidate information, so it's easier to retrieve when necessary.

Each time you revisit the content, the benefit is that you are flattening the forgetting curve until it effectively becomes a straight line like below.

#2 Study less and test more to make content stick.

The next thing you can add to your study smarter strategy is regular testing. Testing is known as retrieval practice within the literature.

A meta-analysis of several hundred studies published by John Dunlosky and colleagues in the 2013 issue of the Psychological Science in the Public Interest has shown that practice testing helps students retrieve information and produces more significant gains in learning than simply studying.

One reason why testing improves recall is that you're extracting the information out of your memory.

Study Less and Test More to Make Content Stick

It seems counterintuitive that this retrieval of memory aids you in understanding the content; however, testing asks your brain to remember cue information. As you reach back into your memory banks, you also organise the information or reconstruct the knowledge and identify strategies for retrieving that information out of your long-term memory.

So you are better able to recall this information in the future. In short, you are practicing what you need to do later in your exam.

This approach increases your recall and thwarts the forgetting curve. How cool is that? That's more time with the kids, your friends, and your loved ones.