A study tool to share

This is not everyone's style of course, but I've found it works really well for me. I've been using an electronic flashcard app (I used gflash but there are many out there) to translate every factoid from my nursing school powerpoints into a question and answer.

I make a table up of all these Q&A's in google docs, then import into gflash, use that as my drill tool and before long I've got the lecture memorized. It's easier for me than making up index card flashcards because I'm a fast typist. Usually by the time I've typed up all my flashcards from a lecture (about 60-100 questions per 2 hour lecture) I know at least 50% of the material.

Gflash presents you with all the questions to get your baseline, then reshuffles and focuses on the ones you missed the first time around, mixing in a few that you already knew. It keeps doing that until you get them all right.

For me, the repitition, and the in-my-head recitation of drilling these electronic flashcards does the trick. And in order to write a meaningful question on my flashcard, I have to have understood the material.

In my program they give us weekly "objectives" that basically summarize what we are supposed to get out of the content from that week. Sometimes all of the objectives are addressed in lecture, and others you really have to dive into the books to get the full picture. I sometimes translate the content from these objectives into flashcards too, if it is really information dense.

This all takes time but it seems to be a guaranteed "A" unless the teacher is intentionally writing nasty questions (we had one of those teachers last spring).

The other plus is, when midterms or finals come around, you've got a whole database of flashcards to run through rather than going back and trying to piece together concepts from the start again.

There are other tools of course. Published study guides that go with the textbooks we use, and online references and practice tests made by the publisher. I've found these things only moderately helpful in actually doing well in the class.

In anatomy class, I found that making powerpoint quiz files (structure on first slide, labels on second slide) was a really effective tool.

This all may be obvious and natural to some, but the last time I was an undergrad none of these tools were around! Now I can have thousands of flashcards on my ipod and organization is a breeze.

I've also found that it is very soothing for me, the morning of a test, to have the feedback of an app that's telling me I know 100% of the material, rather than flipping back and forth between notes and thinking, "gosh, I hope I remember this all, I have no idea how much has stuck."