Medical school has been compared to drinking from a fire hose. Students only have 4 years to absorb the deluge of content they will need to practice medicine. It takes 3 to 4 hours of study every day just to stay on track, and as medical candidates approach their board exams, the study time increases to 10 to 12 hours per day.

Learning and maintaining medical knowledge is literally a full-time job. But that time is only well spent if students adopt proven study habits.

It turns out that some of the most common study strategies aren’t as effective as they seem. In fact, they can make students more anxious about the content and more likely to forget it. Medscape Medical News I spoke with experts to find out which study tips deliver the biggest dividends.

“You spend hours and hours and hours and hours doing it, so why not do it effectively and efficiently? said Ryan Kraemer, MD, medical education researcher and director of the internal medicine residency program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Reduce common mistakes

For some students, studying smarter will require an overhaul of their study schedule.

Indeed, many of the most common study strategies (think reading, highlighting, and re-listening to lectures) are actually not very effective, according to a 2013 meta-analysis study techniques. Although these passive study approaches are frequently used, they do not consistently improve student performance in the long term.

Students who use these tactics may feel like they’re learning effectively in the moment, but “don’t buy into the myth of familiarity,” Kraemer said. This feeling of confidence is actually “the illusion of flow,” a false sense of mastery that humans feel when passively absorbing information.

The truth is that humans remember very little of what they read, Kraemer said. A student can read and reread a process or listen to a long podcast about a diagnosis and begin to feel very familiar with it.

But “just because you’re familiar with the content doesn’t mean you can remember it,” wrote Tony Hannaman, MD, founder of MedStudy, in an article on the site. In fact, a 2012 study (also cited by Hannaman) showed that both processes create activity in different parts of the brain: recall is associated with the hippocampus while familiarity is associated with the right perirhinal cortex.

It is possible to read and review enough to build the short-term memory needed to pass an exam, after all, that is the basis of cramming. But these passive approaches won’t create the long-term memory you need to take exams or treat patients.

They also don’t build your confidence. A Study 2024which was not peer-reviewed, found that Spanish students were more anxious on tests when they used rote memorization tactics like rereading and highlighting.

What to do instead

A better strategy, research suggests, is to practice memorizing or retrieving the information you’ll need.

The same 2024 study found that students who engaged in these recovery strategies — like flashcards, practice tests, and quizzes — reported more positive beliefs like growth mindset and self -efficiency and less test anxiety. A 2013 meta-analysis found that retrieval practice was one of only two methods capable of repeatedly and significantly improving student achievement.

Most students use practice questions to assess their knowledge gaps and decide what to study next. And while it works, practice tests can do so much more. They require students to think critically about content and strengthen knowledge recall, both of which contribute to long-term memory.

“Retrieval is the study technique,” ​​Kraemer said.

There are many ways to personalize it. You can draw a process or anatomy from memory. You can take a practice test, teach a friend, or look at flashcards.

“The key is you have to do it from your own memory, without prompting,” Kraemer said.

You actively engage with the material and practice remembering it. And when you fail — and you will fail — you find out what you missed and try again, he said.

Even if you don’t have an answer key, practice questions are still definitely better rather than reviewing the material repeatedly. But the best results, according to a Study 2023occurs when you repeat a question, card, or practice test multiple times.

While busy medical students may be tempted to abandon a question once they get it correct, studies advise leaving it aside if you have time. Every time you practice remembering something, you strengthen the memory connections in your brain, Kraemer said.

Ian Bogdanowicz, MD, a first-year neurology resident at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, knew from his undergraduate years that grade retention was essential to his learning. And through learning from scientists at his medical school, he knew that recovery practice was a proven approach. So, each week, he established a simple schedule combining the two. He mapped out the number of flashcards and practice questions he needed to complete each day to stay on task. Week after week, he went through thousands of cards and questions, gradually cementing his memory.

“You don’t really realize it until you’re working every day, but a lot of the things I worked on in medical school, they come so naturally now because we worked on them for so long,” said Bogdanowicz. Medscape Medical News.

There are plenty of online resources that offer practice tests and help medical students create flashcards. Ethan Mollick, artificial intelligence education expert recommended ask ChatGPT to query you about the content. It’s essential to remember that ChatGPT is error-prone, so you can’t blindly trust the responses it generates.

But thinking critically about the answers and finding subtle inaccuracies will enrich your learning, he wrote.

Give it time

Once you have a long-term memory, you need to maintain it with practice, Kraemer said.

Distributed practice is the other study strategy that has repeatedly been found to be very effective. There is a long history of evidence showing that students remember better when they space out their study sessions.

In a 2015 studystudents listened to a 45-minute lecture and half revised the content a day later. The other half reviewed the content 8 days later. When students were tested 5 weeks after their respective assessments, the 8-day group significantly outperformed the 1-day review group. This is the advantage of distributed practice – or the spacing effect.

To use the spacing effect, simply try answering questions about a concept a week after learning about it and then a month later, recommended Mark Siegel, MD, director of the traditional internal medicine residency program at the Yale School of Medicine, who also wrote about medicine. education. “As painful as it may seem, it is this process of forgetting and remembering oneself…that builds long-term memory,” he said.

So students should not get discouraged when they forget.

“It’s part of how the brain works,” Siegel said. You forget and remember again and again. “It’s that repetition that builds those neural pathways that make everything smoother” in the long term, he said.

Change your lifestyle and stay healthy

Siegel also recommends changing your study approach.

Instead of mastering one subject at a time, alternate between subjects. This type of interwoven practice is challenging but it improves memory and problem solving.

Also change your exposure to the material, Siegal said. Read and take practice tests. Learn from your peers and listen to podcasts. Watch YouTube videos – as long as you’re careful, you’re coming from credible sources.

“And if you’re involved in clinical rotations, nothing beats reading about your patient,” Siegel said. If you have a patient with pneumonia, “now is the time to learn everything about pneumonia.” The real-world context really helps the content sink in, he said.

It is important to note that learning is not a phase you go through in medicine, it is a way of life. Good doctors are always studying, Siegel said. But none of these study strategies will have the desired effect – in medical school or in your career – if you don’t take care of yourself first.

“You can’t learn at the pace you want if you don’t,” Siegel said. Bogdanowicz agreed. He quickly learned to put a stop to his study time. His goal was to finish studying every day, learn in time for dinner with his wife, and minimize studying on weekends – outside of major exam periods. Self-care was the cornerstone of his schedule.

If you’re putting in the time and using the best strategies but “things aren’t sticking, go to the gym.” Go to sleep,” Siegel said. “You’re not going to figure it all out overnight.”