How to Succeed at Medical School

An Essential Guide to Learning

Dason Evans, Jo Brown

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118703397
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Education

Can you adapt to the wide variety of learning environments in medicine?
Can you show your best abilities in the exams at the same time as learning to be a doctor?
Can you balance your studies with an enjoyable social life?
Can you develop your professionalism and manage your 'digital footprint'? How to Succeed at Medical School will help you learn these vital skills, and much more. Written by experienced medical school teachers and packed full of case studies, illustrations, quotes from other students, tip boxes, exercises, portfolios and learning techniques to help you communicate, study and revise- it's an essential resource to help you thrive at medical school. This thoroughly updated second edition includes new chapters on Professionalism and Teaching, and provides invaluable insight into what to expect from the start of medical school right through to the start of your medical career.

Chapter 1
What kind of learner are you?

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Overview

This chapter forms a foundation for the rest of this book. It will help you become aware of your learning preferences and the factors that tend to affect your learning. This awareness itself will be useful to you, both with respect to planning your learning and with respect to highlighting which chapters of the book you are likely to find particularly important. We have tried to give a brief overview of the most important factors and have tried to encourage you to make some judgements. You might want to revisit this chapter when you have finished the book to see if your impressions have changed.

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Introduction

This chapter might be quite tough to work through. It asks you to take time away from reading to think about the things that affect your learning. The temptation will be just to read on; however, you will benefit considerably from having a few sheets of paper handy and trying to answer each question. Concentrate on each brief exercise and answer it as best you can, it will make the information sink in much better. At the end of the chapter, we have put a summary diagram, which we hope will highlight where you have assessed your strengths and weaknesses.

We will cover the following aspects of learning:

• cognitive aspects (how deep is your learning?)
• motivation (what drives you to learn?)
• self-regulation of study skills (are you aware of how you learn?)
• how do you know when you know enough?
• conception of learning (what you think learning is for?)
• learning in groups (love it or hate it)
• mood and learning (a help or a hindrance)
• VARK (your preferences in using your senses in learning).

You may want to have a brief break after each section, as there is quite a bit to think about.

Aspects of learning

You may have already completed learning style inventories or psychometric tests to try and define what sort of learner you are. There are all sorts of different learning styles and each tends to look at slightly different aspects of learning. The authors of the learning styles inventories claim that greatness can be reached by understanding how you think and learn, using their learning style inventory of course. Our aim is more modest—we hope that by thinking about how you learn, you will become aware of what aspects of learning you will find easier and where the challenges might lie ahead for you.

Filling in a learning style questionnaire was fantastic, it helped me realise the kind of learner I am and build on my natural style.

Jo, first-year graduate entry student.

Cognitive aspects

This refers to the way that you go about building new information into memories—how much do you skim over the surface or how much do you struggle to really understand? How well can you remember something that you have learned? For how long?

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EXERCISE

Think about a topic that you learnt really well. How ‘deep’ was your learning? How much did you think about how your new learning linked in to what you knew already? Did you learn to understand or did you learn to memorise? Which do you find easier?

Make a judgement call, on the line below. Where would you put yourself?

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If you have a preference for memorisation (the left-hand end of the line), then you will do very well with some things—drug names, anatomy, tests that ask you to regurgitate facts—but you are likely to struggle more on those tasks that require a deep understanding or application of the facts; unfortunately, a good amount of research indicates that students scoring towards the right tend to do better at medical school. You might think about some strategies to encourage you to shift more to the right, and in Chapter 2 (Learning Knowledge), we will go through some of these. If you tend to memorise as many facts as possible shortly before exams, forgetting them shortly after and have an easy time the rest of the year, then you will run into trouble with the volume of work in medicine and will need to start working regularly; this might be a challenge for you.

We give more tips on encouraging deep learning in Chapter 2, and advice on timetabling and regular study in Chapter 8.

Motivation

What makes you learn? Do you learn for interest, or perhaps to pass exam or even to please others? Some medical students learn best because they are fascinated by the science of medicine, others learn best when they can see the practical application of their learning and a few learn best when someone is standing over them pressurising them.

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EXERCISE

Spend a minute thinking about what motivates your learning. You might want to spend some time talking with your friends about this, be honest with yourself. As you come to a decision, think about how you might make use of this insight.

I am most motivated to learn by:

• If you find the science fascinating, spend a couple of hours each week in the library looking at the journals—Nature, The Lancet. When learning about diabetes, you will want to read about insulin receptors, about the pathology, about the underlying mechanisms by which diabetes causes increased cardiovascular risk, in addition to the core areas that you need to learn. The commonest pitfall if you are this kind of learner is that you might have some trouble with knowing when to stop reading and when enough is enough—you cannot have a PhD level of knowledge on everything in medicine; we discuss tactics to manage this in Chapter 2.
• If it is patients and the practical application of knowledge that does it for you, you might find some of the bookwork in medicine rather dull and difficult to digest. Spend time thinking about practical applications. If you are learning about dry biochemical pathways, read also about clinical presentations of patients with problems in those pathways. You can look for case studies or even patient videos online that are relevant to your learning. You will want to buy some clinical textbooks early, so that you can read around clinical features of diseases. When learning about the pathology of the cervix, have a read about cervical smears, about the diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer, think about how what you are learning will affect the care you give to patients. You might ask a friendly gynaecologist if you can sit in on their colposcopy clinic. See as many patients as possible and read about the conditions that you have seen—you will remember information much more clearly if you can link it in your memory to a patient you have seen.
• Many students are most highly motivated by exams. If this is you, then look up the exam structure early in the year—look at the objectives, plan how you will cover them. Use past questions to structure your learning and to test yourself, write your own, learn in a group and write tests for each other. The revision section of this book will appeal to you (Chapter 9) and also some of the study strategies in Chapter 2.
• Does ‘knowing that you’ve done a good job' motivate you to learn more? For many of us, praise and reward are important. If it is a major driver for you, you might want to be pragmatic in some of your learning. If you are sitting in an asthma clinic next Thursday, then learn about the management of asthma before then. You will feel like you understand what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword to the first edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What kind of learner are you?
• Chapter 2: Learning knowledge
• Chapter 3: Learning clinical skills
• Chapter 4: Learning clinical communication skills
• Chapter 5: Working in a group
• Chapter 6: Developing your academic writing skills
• Chapter 7: Portfolios and reflection
• Chapter 8: Life–work balance
• Chapter 9: Revision
• Chapter 10: Exam technique: general rules
• Chapter 11: Exam technique: specific examples
• Chapter 12: Teaching, mentoring and coaching: helping others to learn and develop
• Chapter 13: Professionalism: not as straightforward as you think
• Chapter 14: Thinking ahead: student-selected components, careers and electives
• Index
• End User License Agreement