SuccessTypes Survival Strategy
by
John W. Pelley, Ph.D.
author of "SuccessTypes In Medical Education"
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SuccessTypes Survival Strategyby John W. Pelley, Ph.D. |
Survival Strategy
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I developed the SuccessTypes Survival Strategy
as a realistic way of helping at-risk medical students improve their academic performance. If you are currently at-risk, you are dealing with several big problems at once. The root
problem is probably not what you fear, that is, that you are not smart enough.
Instead, the problem is probably in the way you learn, your learning style. Secondary
problems are: 1) coping with the panic that sets in as the threat of failure
becomes increasingly real, 2) coping with the challenge to your self identity as a
successful student, and 3) coping with an increasing mountain of new material.
The SuccessTypes Survival Strategy is only a short term solution.The strategy described below can be an important step in improving your academic performance, and it can also help you survive long enough to learn how to become an even better student. The best time to learn the SuccessTypes methods and philosophy of learning is before you start medical school. Historically, SuccessTypes evolved in my mind as a way of helping students make up for learning deficiencies that they brought into medical school from their undergraduate education. These deficiencies don't always show up in the more flexible undergraduate environment, but when they do show up in the faster paced curriculum of medical school, a change is indicated. However, the fast pace of new information makes it difficult to take time away for solving the problem of an ineffective learning style. The SuccessTypes Survival Strategy doesn't add more onto what you are already doing. I learned long ago, that a medical student's time is fully accounted for. Taking corrective action cannot involve adding something new to their schedule. For example, if a tornado is 500 feet away from you and closing, you're not going to be motivated to build a tornado shelter, you're going to look for a place to hide. There will be time enough to build that shelter after you have cleaned up the mess. (If Texas Tech was located on the coast, I would have used a hurricane analogy). In the same way, if you are getting further behind every day and that next exam is a few weeks away and closing, that exam poses the same threat to your future as the tornado. It's not the time to sit down and learn how to improve the way you learn. To help you find shelter until the storm passes, I've come up with a strategy that you can do on the run. That means you don't have to add anything to what you already are doing and you will still get a head start on changing your learning style in a more effective direction. Here is how it works and why. Study smart, not hard. To put the SuccessTypes Survival Strategy simply, you are going to maximize your effectiveness by getting inside the professor's mind. You are going to quickly develop an anticipation of how the professor thinks, not when he or she is teaching, but when they are writing exam questions. That will take you directly to a list of the most important things to focus on. But, not all of these things in the professor's mind are things that can be memorized. That is why you are in trouble now. If you are used to memorization as a path to academic achievement, you need to take just a moment to look at how that compares with thinking at a higher level. Take a quick look at Chapter 2 from SuccessTypes in Medical Education and you will get an idea of what we're after (and use your back button to get back here). OK, so now you see that you need to start linking material together like an integrative learner, even if it wasn't taught that way. The best way to do this in a hurry is to use practice questions as guides. It is important to point out right now that you are going to get nowhere trying to use practice questions as a self test to see what to study. What to study is not your problem…it's how you are studying that is causing you to miss test questions. I will show you how to use questions as learning objectives by giving you specific steps to follow. Along the way, I will also give you a rationale for how this will contribute to helping you in the long run. Let's get started. There are two major study skill concepts that we are going to integrate, question analysis and time management. This will be drawn from chapters 8 and 10 in SuccessTypes in Medical Education. Effective study is smart study. The time management concept helps your study become effective rather than just efficient. Good time management always stresses effectiveness over efficiency. How are they different? Efficiency is the ability to get a lot done in the time available. Effectiveness is getting the right things done in the time available. For example, efficiency is reading a book at 5,000 words a minute. Effectiveness is determining that you only have to read chapter 3. Question analysis is effective because it has you focus only on the material that is most likely to be asked on the exam and it will help you do it in a way that will increase your chances of correct guesses. And, there is nothing wrong with guessing. Any physician can tell you that clinical diagnosis is just educated guessing, but a physician knows how to think with the data to put probability in their favor. The change in your schedule comes on the weekend. The first rule to follow is to do everything you normally do throughout the week. That is, study the way you usually study, because we don't want to create too many new things for you to adjust to. It's the weekend that I want to have you modify. The second rule is to either catch up or review the past week's work in the time block from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon. The idea is to look at the material thoughtfully, but don't try to memorize it. Just try to make sense of it and go on. Work hard at this because it will be important for the question analysis strategy. The question analysis method should follow your week's review and should probably occupy 3-4 hours late on Sunday. Adjust the time based on your own experience. Practice questions help you study in a performance frame of mind. Now, the third rule is to assemble a group of practice questions which can come from a variety of sources. If you can get copies of old exams, that is ideal. But, there are other sources such as board review books (the McGraw-Hill Pretest series has nothing but questions, also with annotated answers; also the Mosby Rapid Review series that includes my biochemistry book has a large selection of case vignette type questions). It is important to take the questions in random order, the same way they are organized on an exam or in the book. The reason for this is you are trying to train your brain to think in an exam mode. It like performing in a sport. If all you did was study in a classroom how to do a proper tennis serve or how to execute a three point shot under man-to-man coverage, it's not likely you would perform well when the time came to do it in competition. But, if you get out and practice that tennis serve and the three point shot in what I call the "performance environment," you will be much better prepared when the time comes for serious performance. OK, now that you have your questions together let's start practicing your serve. There are two main questions to answer for every practice question. For each practice question, there are two main questions that help you analyze the question.
To do this analysis, go to your class notes or your textbook and turn to the discussion of the subject of the question. Bear in mind that every question is nothing more than a topic, a study topic if you will. And, please don't waste time trying to figure out the correct answer. That's not what we are after now. You simply want to know if the question you are analyzing required you to memorize something, or to compare something, or to deduce cause and effect, etc. What surprises most of the students I have worked with, is the revelation that, unless the question is a straight memorization question (about 1/3 normally are), they had to look in two or three places to find the material that helped them know the right answer. When you begin to notice that the relationships between material are not in strict linear order, you are starting to change your learning in a very important way. You are starting to see the linkages in knowledge. You are starting to see that it isn't just memorization of facts, but interconnection of facts that is real learning. After your first session, you will never be able to study ineffectively again. The way you study during the week will begin to gradually improve. As you turn back into your notes and scan the book you are learning more like people learn when they are not taking courses. You are trying to answer a question, rather than just memorize facts. As you go back over material that you have just covered the previous week in class, you will begin to 'see it differently.' Those, incidentally, are the terms used consistently by students as they describe to me the improvement in their learning. But, the really neat thing is that there is a carry over effect. As you study new material during the week, you will start to see it differently too. You will begin to anticipate what the likely test topics are and how they might appear in a test question. Just let this process happen normally without adding any extra methods to what you are doing. However, if you discover a new method you like better, then substitute it for something you are now doing that is less effective. Wrong answers extend your study into related, and important, topics. Now, take each wrong answer and answer the second question as to how you would have had to study to know it was wrong. Here you will have to use a little judgment. Some wrong answers are just too irrelevant to be of much help, so don't waste time with them. What you are after are those wrong answers that torment you on the exams. When professors are concocting these wrong answers they are trying to see if you have learned the difference between certain concepts, or whether you have classified something correctly. They want a student who is relying on guessing without learning to jump at something that sounds like it ought to be right, but isn't. The way you avoid that trap is to look at the way the question is trying to distract you. Ask yourself, 'Is the answer using a related term just so you will jump at something familiar?' This is very common and I use it a lot in my own test questions. For example, if I'm asking a question on an oxidation reaction, I might put a wrong answer choice that deals with a reduction reaction. A student that understands oxidation won't be fooled by this, but a student that never learned the difference might take the bait. So, here is how you beat me at this game. If you have a practice question that asks a question about an oxidation reaction and it has a wrong answer choice about reduction, try to figure out why it is wrong. In the process you will not only learn about reduction reactions, but you will learn more about oxidation since the two topics are related. This illustrates that by studying wrong answers you will many times be led into related topics, thus preparing you for several more questions. One question can prepare you for 10 more. No one question will prepare you completely in one topic, but some can come close to a thorough review of a subtopic. A question on noncompetitive inhibition, for example, will usually guide you, as you analyze it, into the Michaelis constants, competitive inhibition, allosteric regulation, and Lineweaver-Burke double reciprocal plots. But, question analysis brings an additional perspective that regular memorization doesn't. By looking at all these topics in terms of why they are right or wrong answers, you unconsciously start developing a more integrated understanding of how they relate to the overall topic. Practice questions focus your study on the most important topics first. One final point. You should also realize that professors usually make up their questions in a hurry. The daily life of a professor revolves around research grants and the data that is needed to keep these grants going. In the big picture this isn't all bad, because generally what these professors are working on is quite exciting… much more exciting than making up exam questions. Even with the best of intentions their thinking is rushed. Therefore, they will tend to ask about concepts that are more obvious. The only thing that keeps them from being totally predictable is that they think more in terms of integration and linkages between topics. That's what makes them scientists. But, you can take advantage of this through question analysis. Practice questions provide you with something that many professors fail to do, and that is a list of high priority topics. When you study high priority, you are using your time effectively. The material you don't study has the lowest probability on the exam, and therefore the lowest priority in your learning. Let's go over the main points:
Last updated:
02/18/10
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