Google Doc outlines (vs. Anki) as good study strategy for preclinical?

[ABigChunguss]

Hey everyone, incoming MS1 here! One question I had was is Anki necessarily the best way to go for the pre-clerkship curriculum or have many people found success without it? If you didn't use Anki, how did you study? I ask because I've tried using Anki before for other things like language learning and didn't find it that useful or fun. I understand the spaced repetition concept it's based on and that it's extremely popular among med as well as premed students.

Instead of Anki/flashcards, I've always liked reading assigned text and/or slides and then summarizing (from memory as much as possible) and structuring the material into outline format on Google Docs. I'd also paste into the doc any pictures I find particularly useful or images I've drawn myself. I include mnemonics and connections to topics in other subjects as retrieval cues for myself. I put all materials from the course in that one doc, so it becomes easily searchable as well. To be fair, it takes a really long time to make the outline, but once I'm done it tends to really stick; I'd need maybe one more relatively quick refresher come exam time. It's also easy to edit things in during lecture or from reading additional material. During a multiple-choice exam if I'm struggling to remember a detail, having the outline structure in mind helps me get to the answer via POE. In medical school, when I get to clerkship years, I could potentially revisit my outlines for every organ system to refresh my fundamentals. Not sure if Anki allows these benefits.

On the other hand, because outlines are time-consuming to make, I wouldn't get to have more than 2-3 passes through the material, whereas Anki can give you multiple exposures to your content weaknesses. And what worked before med school won't necessarily work with the firehose of info I'll get in med school. And most people I know don't make outlines nearly as obsessively as I do, so maybe I'm missing a trick? So what's better for the preclinical curriculum?

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[Hzreio]

I’d highly recommend Anki. There’s too much for outlines imo ymmv

 

[mvenus929]

Spaced repetition is one way of increasing your retention of a subject. Summarizing and interleaving are other ways, which it sounds like you are doing (maybe less interleaving, but certainly summarizing and rephrasing). Your spaced repetition may be reviewing your outline at varying intervals.

I learned in medical school by 'answering' learning objectives. I'd look up the information, summarize it into a way that made sense to me, and move on. I'd go through the document I created before quizzes and exams and then went through it again leading up to Step 1 (in addition to step 1 study materials). Did I remember everything, no. But I also didn't have the interest or patience to go through dozens of flashcards every day and would often get frustrated when I couldn't remember the answer *yet again*.

 

[ABigChunguss]

Spaced repetition is one way of increasing your retention of a subject. Summarizing and interleaving are other ways, which it sounds like you are doing (maybe less interleaving, but certainly summarizing and rephrasing). Your spaced repetition may be reviewing your outline at varying intervals.

I learned in medical school by 'answering' learning objectives. I'd look up the information, summarize it into a way that made sense to me, and move on. I'd go through the document I created before quizzes and exams and then went through it again leading up to Step 1 (in addition to step 1 study materials). Did I remember everything, no. But I also didn't have the interest or patience to go through dozens of flashcards every day and would often get frustrated when I couldn't remember the answer *yet again*.

Neat; sounds like we have similar strategies. It seems you had 2 exposures to the material (one when creating the doc and one when reviewing) before each test; do you think you lost much in the way of long-term learning from not getting the multiple exposures that Anki allows?
Also, since you are a physician per your profile, did the docs you created help with later clerkships or even in your current field? If not, are there adjustments you'd make to the docs that would have made them useful for you in the longer term? By useful I mean, for example, the doc allows you to quickly and efficiently refresh your knowledge of an organ system before studying in your clerkship a disease and its treatment options or management protocol; you could look at review books to refresh basics, but revisiting what you've already studied might help pull more out of your memory bank?

 

[imidazzle92]

Anki isn't necessary if you have a method to schedule spaced repetition. The "active learning" component can be as simple as summarizing a topic out loud or in writing and then looking at your notes to see if you got everything. Plenty of friends who crushed Step without using much Anki.

 

[mvenus929]

Neat; sounds like we have similar strategies. It seems you had 2 exposures to the material (one when creating the doc and one when reviewing) before each test; do you think you lost much in the way of long-term learning from not getting the multiple exposures that Anki allows?
Also, since you are a physician per your profile, did the docs you created help with later clerkships or even in your current field? If not, are there adjustments you'd make to the docs that would have made them useful for you in the longer term? By useful I mean, for example, the doc allows you to quickly and efficiently refresh your knowledge of an organ system before studying in your clerkship a disease and its treatment options or management protocol; you could look at review books to refresh basics, but revisiting what you've already studied might help pull more out of your memory bank?

I mean, I didn't do as well on Step 1 as many of my classmates did, but I have a hard time with memorizing--I do much better when I have context to put meaning to what I'm learning. So those things I could relate back to patients in some way tended to be things that stuck much better. But it's hard to do that as a student who hasn't had the exposure (consequently, I did much, much better, by about 50 points, on Step 2 and I've done well on all my board exams since).

It's been a bit since I looked at my documents, but I did occasionally use them during clerkships. I went into peds, which isn't really taught well in the first couple years of medical school, so many of the things I didn't have a reason to go back to.

 

[Redpancreas]

I mean, I didn't do as well on Step 1 as many of my classmates did, but I have a hard time with memorizing--I do much better when I have context to put meaning to what I'm learning. So those things I could relate back to patients in some way tended to be things that stuck much better. But it's hard to do that as a student who hasn't had the exposure (consequently, I did much, much better, by about 50 points, on Step 2 and I've done well on all my board exams since).

It's been a bit since I looked at my documents, but I did occasionally use them during clerkships. I went into peds, which isn't really taught well in the first couple years of medical school, so many of the things I didn't have a reason to go back to.

To be fair, a lot of the biochemistry, genetics, embryology (think congenital cards), neurology, and psychiatry we learn is specific to peds. As Internal Medicine, we hardly touch a lot of that stuff unless someone comes in for something else and we see it on the comorbids. You may have felt similarly about a lot of the pathophysiology/drugs that are mostly relevant to adult medicine.

 

[mvenus929]

To be fair, a lot of the biochemistry, genetics, embryology (think congenital cards), neurology, and psychiatry we learn is specific to peds. As Internal Medicine, we hardly touch a lot of that stuff unless someone comes in for something else and we see it on the comorbids. You may have felt similarly about a lot of the pathophysiology/drugs that are mostly relevant to adult medicine.

There's also learning the basic science of something and then applying it in the patient. Yes, embryology is enormously helpful for figuring out why certain conditions present the way they do, but it doesn't necessarily help with the management of the patient in front of you. I'm also in endocrinology, so the biochem is more pertinent to me than most people, but I still don't think about how ketones are made on the daily--it's more a simplified algorithm in my head that I can expand on if I need to.

 

[Redpancreas]

There's also learning the basic science of something and then applying it in the patient. Yes, embryology is enormously helpful for figuring out why certain conditions present the way they do, but it doesn't necessarily help with the management of the patient in front of you. I'm also in endocrinology, so the biochem is more pertinent to me than most people, but I still don't think about how ketones are made on the daily--it's more a simplified algorithm in my head that I can expand on if I need to.

So true.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

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