Whether you are starting your medical school life or beginning your final year, a great amount of emphasis is laid on memorization throughout your medical school life. Students in medical schools often feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of factual and procedural knowledge that they have to learn in order to succeed. Be it quizzes, presentations or exams, memorization is the key to acing medical school exams. However unfortunately, most medical students are oblivious to how they can hone in on their memorization skills by sharpening their memory.
This is why most medical students fret over whether they will be able to memorize all this deluge of information, needed for clearing national board examinations with flying colors and complete medical training. Here are some learning strategies and effective memorization techniques to commit to memory the sheer amount of facts medical students are bombarded with.
Active Recall through Visuals and Stories
Humans are visual thinkers, which is why we can easily reminisce any information incorporating images. Sequences of images can help you retain key pieces of information. You can impinge the ocean of biological terms on your mind by forming strong association with pictures. Fabricating some surprising and unusual stories around facts is another effective technique for impressing vital information on the memory. Surrounding information with absurd and outlandish stories and visuals work wonders and helps you recall information easily.
Spaced Repetition to Learn More in Less Time
It is an effective memory boosting and learning technique that makes it easier for your brain to take a trip down the memory lane and recall information. Spaced repetition is an interesting technique that can help you learn a new thing, language or term, commit to memory your entire medical course or prepare for your national board examinations.
A simple and easy way around this trick is to capitalize on flashcards and organize them in a box. Set aside a time to revise the cards in each section of the box. It is a highly effective memorization technique that every medical student should use because it deliberately rewires the way your brain performs. It poses a mental challenge, which in turn forces your brain to actively respond to that stimulus by strengthening connections between nerve cells.
Spaced repetition produces long-term and durable retention of information, allowing you to learn more complex information in less time. You can leverage some spaced learning tools such as Osmosis and Anki during your training at a Caribbean medical school and polish your memory and skill acquisitions.
Making Strong Connections to Learn Things Effectively
Another memory-boosting hack for a medical student is to attach pictures which somehow link to something that they need to memorize, and paste those pictures on the walls of their room. Looking at these images can help you recall information that seemed so elusive a while back. In addition, you can attach a disease to specific organs and remember the particular terms of physiology, pathology, and psychological consequences that ensue.
Self-testing Helps Improve Memory
Some studies go so far as to suggest that tests can help improve long-term memory and the ability to retrieve important information. You can leverage self-testing products to prepare for your exams. Self-testing is essential to gauge your understanding of the concept, consolidate knowledge, integrate related information and figure out whether additional studying should be done. Self-testing can create strong connections that make critical reasoning easier and offers hints by repetition. It also boosts your confidence and alleviates anxiety. To put it in a nutshell, Self-testing technique not only helps you store and recall information but also sharpens your memorizing skills.
Interleaving
Interleaving is a powerful learning and memory improving technique that fortifies memory associations and makes it easier to learn complex medical terminologies. Mixing up different topics in a single study session makes it possible to learn a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time. This method of learning is more effective than focusing on just one topic at a time and then immediately switching to another topic or subject. It will help your brain establish connections between topics while you are studying them.
Since the technique sounds difficult and slower in the beginning, it helps you grasp information in the long run, recall information more frequently and restore the information.
Over to You
These are some effective memorization techniques that help medical students memorize and recall information for exams. Experiment with these techniques and find the one that works best for you. Keep in mind the memorization skills you develop today will help you succeed in the Caribbean medical school and build a brilliant medical career.
