High school student doing a project — What study methods helped you learn anatomy best?

[stellalucille]

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Hi! I’m a Year 12 student in Australia doing an independent project in a subject called Activating Identities in Futures (AIF).

For my task, I’m exploring what study techniques are most effective for learning anatomy, since I’m planning to go into medicine myself.

As part of the task, I need to engage with people who’ve studied anatomy before, so I was wondering:
What study techniques helped you the most in med school when it came to learning anatomical structures, systems, and terminology?

I’d love to hear what worked (or didn’t)!

Even a sentence or two would be a huge help, and I’ll be reflecting on all the responses I get in my assignment.

Thank you so much in advance!

 

[Toffifay]

Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy for remembering names. Flashcards for details like innervation and blood supply to particular structures.
Spending time in cadaver lab for spatial studying.

 

[Doctor-S]

Hi! I’m a Year 12 student in Australia doing an independent project in a subject called Activating Identities in Futures (AIF).

For my task, I’m exploring what study techniques are most effective for learning anatomy, since I’m planning to go into medicine myself.

As part of the task, I need to engage with people who’ve studied anatomy before, so I was wondering:
What study techniques helped you the most in med school when it came to learning anatomical structures, systems, and terminology?

I’d love to hear what worked (or didn’t)!

Even a sentence or two would be a huge help, and I’ll be reflecting on all the responses I get in my assignment.

Thank you so much in advance!

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1. Practice and repetition using reputable resources (e.g., books and charts) and study aids - lots of it!

2. Mnemonics - there are plenty of well-known mnemonics for learning anatomy (e.g., names of the bones in the human hand) and memorizing them. For more complicated structures, I "personalized" my mnemonics by using a string of words or names of people or pets that I knew I could recall pretty easily. Many students learn multiple time-tested mnemonics about anatomy and physiology in medical school, such as "So Long To Pinky Here Comes The Thumb" for carpal bones.

3. Drawing or diagramming anatomical structures and labeling everything in proper detail or whatever method works best for you. Here is a picture of Muscle A, and this is Muscle B, and B is innervated by C, and it has Functions X, Y, Z. Once again, whatever works best for you until you learn more about medicine - it gets easier over time with practice and repetition. I also practiced with flash cards.

4. Working-out at the gym (e.g., lifting weights) or engaging in other physical activities (swimming). I quizzed myself about identifying and visualizing the muscles I was using (or feeling) and how the muscles responded (or did not respond or react) to different physical motions or movements (e.g., doing a flip turn in swimming). You get the idea, eh?

5. Describing structures in adequate detail and explaining systems to someone else (e.g., explaining the circulatory system to a classmate). If I could clearly and correctly explain the structure (e.g., where it was located and its function) to someone else and they "understood" what I was describing or explaining to them, it reinforced greater confidence in my own level of clinical knowledge and learning trajectory. Always more practice and repetition.

Hope these suggestions are useful to you and best of success on your independent project!

 

[polymerization]

It would depend on how I was being assessed. For human anatomy in undergrad, you are most likely to be tested on models instead of cadavers, so committing to memory the professor's favorite chart(s) for the class was the easiest way—it was most likely they would test you from the same chart, since other atlases might go into different levels of specificity or orient the "patient" differently than you were expecting. It would also be important to be able to spend time with the model itself so you develop an appreciation for the dimensionality and depth of the structures you're learning about. I tried to do the whole VR model thing, it didn't work for me at the time. I also tried a digital model they had available for iPad at the time, didn't like that either. For me, it was easier to focus on regional anatomy to have more manageable chunks to digest vs. just expecting you could touch anything on the body and identify it.

When I took comparative anatomy, the class required weekly dissections where the professor would come around and ask you to identify X structure on your animal, which was really hard to do if you were just going based off of the "cartoons." For dissections, I felt you really needed to know the anatomy but also train yourself to identify structures in dissection images. It also required that you think twice before you cut, since you can't offer a mangled organ to your professor. I would spend time watching guided dissections to learn how deeply to cut, where the landmarks are, what are the most likely structures that will need to be identified in this animal, that kind of thing.

 

[Goro]

Hi! I’m a Year 12 student in Australia doing an independent project in a subject called Activating Identities in Futures (AIF).

For my task, I’m exploring what study techniques are most effective for learning anatomy, since I’m planning to go into medicine myself.

As part of the task, I need to engage with people who’ve studied anatomy before, so I was wondering:
What study techniques helped you the most in med school when it came to learning anatomical structures, systems, and terminology?

I’d love to hear what worked (or didn’t)!

Even a sentence or two would be a huge help, and I’ll be reflecting on all the responses I get in my assignment.

Thank you so much in advance!

Being a visual learner, I always drew pictures. lots of pictures.

I sure wish I had YouTube when I was learning my craft, some 30-40 years ago!