![]() ![]() ![]() Think about times in your past when you’ve performed at your best. This is also a good time to engage in ‘meta-cognition’ which is in essence thinking about how you think and process information. Under each learning style, the VARK website has some initial suggestions of approaches you can take to learning information. ![]() Once you have your results, you can begin to think about the ways you learn best. I don’t necessarily think I get a ton out of a lot of lecture material so it was surprising to hear aural learning was my top result! Like any third party resource, take your questionnaire results with a grain of salt. Visual ranked at the middle of the road and kinesthetic was dead last. The test classified me as a ‘multi-modal’ learner (which most people are, to a degree) with a bias towards read/write and aural/auditory information. Check as many boxes that seem relevant, submit, and check out the results! I’ll share mine with you below. You can read more about the details of these categories on the VARK website. ![]() Overall there are 4 major categories (visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic). The questionnaire takes about 5-10 minutes, and will ask you several questions about how you prefer to engage with information and approach unknown material. One of the most readily available (and free) is the VARK questionnaire (note: this is the author’s opinion alone and doesn’t reflect any endorsed stance of Med School Tutors). This can be accomplished in many ways, but a helpful starting point is taking a learning style assessment. In order to make the most out of your cherished study time, you will find it first helpful to clarify your learning style. We will discuss taking a learning assessment, and using the results to hone your study approach through “meta-cognition.” Success awaits, so let’s get going! (Prefer to listen/watch? Jump ahead to our video.) Take a Learning Assessment to Determine Your Learning Style This blog post will explore the different ways people learn best, and how to cater your Step 1 studying approach to your learning style using the assortment of popular Step 1 study resources that are available. To master this mountain of material and be ready on test day to crush your exam, it’s useful to take a step back and think about the type of learner you are and how you can design your study regimen to best approach your learning style. But Step 1 can feel like a whirlwind, in which there are so many pieces of paper it is overwhelming and there are never enough stones to keep them from blowing away. You might try to keep it down with your foot, or set a stone down to keep it in place, and when you are really rocking a pre-clinical class it’s sometimes easy to feel successful at mastering all the pages of material. Each piece of clinical knowledge in medical school can feel like a piece of paper blowing away on a windy day. In pre-clinicals, and now in my 3rd year, I’ve certainly found this to be true. It really does feel sometimes like ‘drinking from a fire hose.'” I asked this question to a few people on the interview trail, and still recall what one wise, grizzled 4th year shared with me, “Medical school is not any harder than the courses you took in college, in fact in many ways the material is easier - physics, organic chemistry, and on - you won’t encounter any subject close to that difficult in class. How would I possibly learn the sheer volume of material that I would soon face? But as my school start date crept towards me, anxious thoughts started to swirl in my mind. I remember the pure joy of realizing I could now pursue my dream of becoming a doctor, the acceptance phone call I got from the dean of admissions followed by the excitement of telling my friends and family. This post was originally written by Zach Davidson and has since been updated by the Med School Tutors team. ![]()
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