Transcript for:
Active Recall and Testing in Medical Studying

everyone tells you that to study well you need to test yourself do practice questions do active recall but no one shows you how no one gives you an exact practical every step of the way method no one really tells you their mental process while they're doing all of this my name is Zay oif I'm a third-year medical student and in this video I will be revising these medical topics right in front of you I'll be testing myself doing the active recall all in real time talking you through everything that is happening in my head how I'm answering each of these questions what I'm doing if I don't understand something what I'm doing to actually improve and create these questions this is the third part of the live studying series ever since I made active testing a major part of my revision process my life has changed and I don't say this lightly after years of incorporating these testing techniques into my studying I can easily say that the times I did that crazy top 1% level well in my exams can be correlated with the times I did this active testing created these recall questions and regularly tested myself prior to the exam even though practically I put in the same effort as usual the recall question method the key idea behind it is very simple first you read through and process every piece of information that you need to learn into these questions so instead of making notes from lectures chapters topics whatever it is create a list of questions from them and then second when you come back to revise this topic you actively test yourself on these questions test your knowledge off the topics one by one and fill in the gaps and understand the stuff that you don't know that is legit 90% of how I study to this day the questions that I'm going to tackle today and test myself on I made around a week ago on liver diseases I've already made a video on how to understand the topic and create questions from it side by side check that video right here layer by layer it's my full layering method and today I'm testing myself on these questions I'm trying to figure out what I don't understand and go back to the material anyways you'll see I'm going to show you [Music] how [Music] and what I'm doing is attempting roughly one to three recall questions at a time and trying my best to remember as much as possible as I can before then going back to the resources I hope you saw that I'm spending several minutes on this process of testing myself because testing doesn't just mean looking at the flash card or the question for 2 seconds and then click into the answer trying your best to actively formulate an answer in your head when testing yourself if it's hard for you to actually come up with an answer in your head and speak to yourself like this then just at least write it down on the paper taking the time to formulate the answer in your head and not just jump straight into the information is the thing that most people miss out on in this process so take your time with each set of questions it's important that's one of the reasons that you shouldn't have thousands of questions to go through my tip is that you should have around 15 to 20 Questions per average lecture or small topic and I'm not perfect at this I wasn't doing anything perfectly but as you saw I was trying to put as much mental effort into to this process because at the end of the day mental effort is the currency of learning and remembering your information step two I fill in the knowledge gaps the second part as you saw after you've tried testing yourself and formulating the answer is now going back to the resources to the information and seeing where your knowledge gaps are and because you've already spent some time pushing your brain to remember you'll flick to the resources look at the information and immediately you'll be able to make links between the things that you couldn't remember like oh this is what this was this is how it works worked for example as you can see in the recording I'm trying to remember fibrotic scores and trying to see the different tests that are required to look at the stages for this disease and I'm trying to put an effort but I can't remember so I flick to the resources and now I'm going through the textbook again trying to figure out better ways to remember and understand what's happening in the in the elf test or what the fif 4 index is I'm always trying to think how can I connect these random details to my initial mind map and the way I at the start understood this topic that is what I spend most of my time doing I test myself I try to remember and then don't remember most of it and then spend more time trying to understand and think about better ways to remember it for next time and then I just finish it off by then color gring these questions as you probably saw red orange green so that I can just start with the red questions and the orange questions next time and focus more on them than the green ones the question I get constantly is why I don't just write the answers underneath these questions or make flash cards and the thing is there's nothing wrong with this tactic it just takes extra time and sometimes it's not as effective because if you just have an answer there like when you flip the flash card if you have it just underneath the questions then you become reliant on those two to three line excerpts you will naturally end up only focusing on the bullet point answers that are underneath your questions and then end up Road memorizing them from Pure pattern recognition rather than just actually understanding the stuff the reason going back to the original resources like your textbooks and lectures is better after you answer the question in your head is because this way you are actually going through the information in context you're looking at the sentences before or after you might skim through a bit more of the subtopic you might look at something else anotherab heading and make better connections and as a result you'll understand and remember that answer better for next time for me in the long run doing this process filling in the knowledge gaps as you go along with the questions saves so much time because at the end I just need to revise less and less because my understanding and revision is so strong in itself compared to just having to bang out hundreds of flash cards again and again and again anyways let's continue with the questions and I'll reveal more of the process as I go [Music] along this second topic was pretty much the same process so I won't repeat it but what I wanted to talk about is something that most people Miss completely and it's about how to quickly understand the information and it's such a strong way so you don't actually have to come back and revise this again and again this thought process while you're understanding is one of the most important things I've learned in the last year yet it's actually going to be quite difficult to explain because it's all happening in my head I'm continuously thinking back to my initial mental model this initial mind map and seeing where all this detailed information that I'm learning about and answering questions about fits in this picture and the thing is I don't need to actually look at this mind map again and again because this flow and the way this topic works the way I've represented it here is in my head let me try and explain this better to create true understanding of anything you need to tell your brain that this information or whatever I'm learning is relevant and important but the truth is even if you know that this is important and then you need to tell your brain that this information is relevant or else you won't remember even if you know this actually doing this while you're reading through the information and doing this again and again is quite tough but because I've created this foundational mind map that links all the main concepts of this disease and how it works together anything I'm reading afterwards automatically becomes relevant to my brain because I'm linking it back to that mind map because when answering the questions when going through the information I'm continuously thinking about okay where does this idea fit in that initial picture that I have of the topic how does a specific medication help me treat this aspect of the disease how does this scan identify the SOS part of the liver everything I read automatically becomes IR relevant to my brain because I'm linking whatever I'm learning to some part of this initial mental model and the way I think about this topic so as a result I always end up understanding these topics much much more deeply in the same amount of time and to be honest I've always done some version of encoding where I'm linking in the information I'm learning to my previous knowledge and that helps with understanding better but making this mental model at the start is the thing that has not really easily allowed me to link the information in my head and as a result understand and remember all of these topics a lot better and even if parts of this initial mind map or the way I'm thinking about the whole thing is wrong or basic cuz I made this at the start my knowledge was very basic at that point me then going to correct it thinking about different ways these diseases can be linked together or the main Concepts and the symptoms can be linked together all of this correction is an active process that is only deepening my understanding so I really want to emphasize that when you're reading these details when you're going through the information link back to that initial mental model that big picture that you made of the topic another frequent question I get is what's the way to actually make make good questions throughout this process I was trying to continuously improve these recall questions adding more removing some because at the beginning your questions will suck like honestly I don't know if I Chang the questions much today but I usually change them a lot and the whole thing just looks completely different every time I come back to revise it on the first run through of the topic when you're making the questions quickly the questions can be repetitive sometimes they're not detail oriented enough sometimes they're just too vague so for the people that are asking me how to make good questions generally the two rules I like to follow is the recall questions that you create need to be dependent on the exam type the question type that you're revising for and second they need to be dependent on the subject or the topic that you're studying if you have medicine related or conceptual multiple choice questions then just make a ton of questions that are asking for very specific detail if you have bigger conceptual essay based exams then make questions that are essay based make questions that are testing you on different processes if it's maths chemistry physics then do a question or two questions for each problem type that you're being assessed for anyways that was just a bit of advice this was the full revision process of these topics me actively testing myself recorded live I really tried to give you a detailed Insight of what I do what's exactly happening in my head and I hope you can take away some two to three small things to improve your own learning process I will continue to produce more videos for this live studying Series in the future so let me know any specific parts of the studying process that you struggle with and I'll try and address that by the way I'm sorry about my voice I was sick for the last few weeks I lost my voice last week and it's now slowly coming back I hope it didn't bother you too much but leave a like spam the comments and I will see you in the next one