With the start of the new school year, 25,000 incoming medical students in the United States—and hundreds of thousands of students around the world—are wondering how best to study so they can succeed in classes, on board exams, and in the clinic. Fortunately, decades worth of neuroscience research has given us an entire toolkit of techniques, many of which you probably have not heard of before.
Both of us have devoted much of our careers before and during medical school to assimilating and testing these cognitive techniques; the result of these efforts is our learning platform, Osmosis. Here we will highlight six of the most effective, neuroscience-backed study techniques that we've incorporated into Osmosis that every clinical student should know and how you can apply them.
Technique 1: Test-Enhanced Learning
Having taken dozens of high-stakes summative tests, ranging from class finals to the MCAT, SAT, and ACT, you've probably come to associate tests with the end of a learning experience rather than as part of it. Fortunately, over the past decade, researchers have been chipping away at this dogma; now, educators are beginning to view low-stakes formative tests as integral parts of the learning process. Testing has been shown to more effectively improve knowledge retention
