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Study with Me + Active Recall tips · Life as a Junior Doctor

2018-11-29 · Study with me · Ali · recording, 7:26 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Sponsor segment present, Evidence-based framing, Aimed at students

Continuing his Advanced Life Support preparation, Ali explains how he uses active recall: no flashcard for every new fact, two kinds of questions (discrete facts and open "what's the deal with…" questions), active recall as any form of testing yourself, spaced repetition within a day, and effort as the point of studying.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Morning, meeting a student from Germany, and a standing coffee offer

  • ★ Ali has a standing offer to buy a coffee in Cambridge for anyone who wants to meet him in person. — 00:00:00 · Cambridge

00:00:29 — Japanese on Rosetta Stone (sponsor read)

  • ★ Getting his Japanese skills up to speed has become a personal project of Ali's. — 00:00:29 · Japan

00:01:12 — Revisiting yesterday's questions, highlighting, and not making a flashcard for everything

  • ★★ Ali starts his Advanced Life Support study session by revisiting the active recall questions he wrote the day before: spaced repetition in action. — 00:01:27 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Reading the course book, Ali highlights what is new to him or particularly interesting and turns some highlights into questions to go through later that day and again a few days later. — 00:01:27 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali does not turn every highlight or new fact into a question or flashcard: students starting with active recall often do, and end up with thousands of flashcards they never have time to go through. — 00:01:27 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali says there is no hard and fast rule for what warrants a flashcard: familiarity with a subject teaches you to judge how relevant new information is, which is why it is easy to make too many flashcards when starting a subject. — 00:01:57

00:02:25 — Two types of questions: discrete facts and "what's the deal with…"; synchronised shocks

  • ★★★ The first of Ali's two types of questions is discrete facts you either know or don't, such as drug dosing, mechanisms of action or the nerve supply of a muscle, which suit flashcards or his spreadsheet. — 00:02:25 · active recall

  • ★★★ Ali's second type of question starts "what's the deal with…", such as "what's the deal with synchronized shocks?": flashcard enthusiasts would find it vague and open-ended, but he thinks it a fantastic test of understanding. — 00:02:25 · active recall

    “starts with the phrase, what's the deal with”

  • ★★ Answering a "what's the deal with…" question, Ali imagines explaining the topic to one of the junior medical students. — 00:03:00

  • ★★ Ali explains that unsynchronised defibrillator shocks are used for ventricular fibrillation and pulseless ventricular tachycardia, while an unstable but alive patient with a tachycardia needs a shock synchronised to the R wave, since a shock during the T wave could flip them into VF. — 00:03:00
  • ★★★ A "what's the deal with…" question makes Ali run through the reasoning in his head and look up any holes on Google, which is far quicker than writing a long full answer on a flashcard. — 00:03:52 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali writes scripts only for his Study With Me videos, so that he can record the voice-over first and fit the footage to it later. — 00:03:52

00:04:08 — Writing the script, errands, his mum's birthday present and dinner at Tycoon

00:04:54 — Three points: active recall just means testing yourself, spaced repetition within a day, effort is the point

  • ★★★ Answering students' worries about what counts as active recall, Ali says it just means testing yourself, however you do it: flashcards, Anki, Quizlet, Google Sheets or questions written by hand. — 00:05:24 · active recall, Anki, Quizlet, Google Sheets

    “active recall just means testing yourself. It doesn't matter how you do it.”

  • ★★ As active recall, Ali suggests writing down everything you know about a topic without looking at the book, as a spider diagram, a bullet-point list or an essay, or answering little questions you have set yourself. — 00:05:24 · active recall

  • ★★★ Before moving on from a chapter, Ali glances back through his active recall questions for the previous chapters: spaced repetition, the second pillar of efficient studying, works even when you repeat material the same day. — 00:05:53 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★ Going through the rhythm strip analysis chapter, Ali covers up the answers to test himself, fighting the temptation to just read through it. — 00:06:22

  • ★★★ Testing yourself is always more work than just reading, Ali says, but that effort helps links form in the brain: studying is supposed to feel like effort, and the more effortful, the better you encode and retain. — 00:06:22 · active recall

    “So don't be disgruntled if you're studying feels like effort. It's supposed to.”

00:06:51 — Stopping for the night and sign-off

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Mentioned

Central: "what's the deal with…" question · active recall · Advanced Life Support · spaced repetition

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Ali Abdaal's mother

Places: Cambridge · Germany · Japan

Products: Anki · Boosted Mini S · Google Sheets · Kindle · Quizlet · Rosetta Stone · WhatsApp

Also centred on Advanced Life Support: Study with Me - Resuscitation Training · Life as a Junior Doctor

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