Study techniques: Nursing student success

Study techniques are strategies used to understand and retain information. They can help with comprehending complex material, enhancing critical thinking, developing clinical judgment, and making studying more efficient.

As a nursing student, you’ll discover what study techniques work best for your learning style, personal preferences, and coursework. So, let’s explore a few study techniques!

Starting with interleaving, this involves mixing up the order of the topics while you study. This differs from blocking, where you focus on one topic for a large amount of time.

For instance, when using blocking while preparing for a pharmacology exam on cardiovascular medications, you may begin with a topic like diuretics, and once you feel comfortable with that topic, you move on to calcium channel blockers, and then on to anticoagulants, and so forth.

In contrast, you can use interleaving by spending a bit of time reviewing diuretics, then calcium channel blockers, and then back to diuretics again. After that, you’ll go to anticoagulants, then back to calcium channel blockers, and finally, return to anticoagulants.

Because interleaving forces you to switch between topics, it helps you practice retrieving information, which ultimately enhances your long-term memory. It can also help you improve decision making by showing how topics relate to each other, and this can help you apply the information to real world situations!

Now, interleaving can be a challenging way to learn because it requires a lot of planning and organization in the short term, but if it works for you, you may find you have better long-term results!

Next up is spaced repetition, where you space out your study of topics at increasingly spaced intervals. Typically, for information you’re familiar with, you’ll have more widely spaced intervals; whereas for information you’re less familiar with you’ll have shorter intervals. This sets you up to review information at the time you’re about to forget it!

For instance, let’s say you’re learning about heart failure, and you complete the readings, take lecture notes, and answer discussion questions.

You note you feel familiar and confident with the information on cardiac anatomy, but the information about antihypertensive medications feels a lot more challenging.

So, during subsequent study sessions, you’ll review cardiac anatomy less frequently, or at more widely spaced intervals; but you’ll review antihypertensive medications more frequently, or at shorter intervals.

Over time, you’ll adjust your intervals based on which information becomes more familiar, and which information remains challenging.

Spaced repetition allows you to make the most of your study time by focusing on information you're less familiar with. This lets you study smarter, not longer! However, spaced repetition can take some effort to set up and requires consistent scheduling to adjust study intervals to your needs. So, it’s a good idea to use a planner or even smartphone apps to help you keep track of when you need to review each topic.