Do you find it hard to study? Do you tend to forget your course too often? Do you find it hard to concentrate on your studies? If yes, then this page is just for you. Tried and tested over many years, the techniques have been extensively practiced and found useful. Then what are you waiting for? Go ahead.
Happy reading!

It is essential in study to have a definite plan of campaign. A suitable plan makes all the difference between success and failure. Although a person's level of intelligence does make an impact on his ultimate performance, yet even mediocre students can significantly better their performance if they follow certain simple basic rules.
In this discussion, certain well-accepted principles of better study and methods to manipulate the memory have been discussed. Before we actually go on to discuss them, it may be pointed out that these are not necessarily the best nor are they universally applicable. Each student can devise certain other methods to suit his own intelligence, aptitude and convenience.

A. Make A Time Table

This is the most talked about and yet the most neglected aspect. It is worth giving it a trial if you have not yet done it. Here is how you should go about doing it.
When you start making a timetable, you find that the total available time varies each day and no generalizations are possible. Certain evenings are heavy, others are light. The solution to this lies in making the week and not evening as the unit of study. With a policy of give and take, it should be possible for you to have a regular study time.
A word of caution is needed here. Estimate your own capacity because if you are too heroic, you may not be able to keep up the schedule- a time table that falls through has disastrous after effects. Therefore you should gauge your capacity fairly and accurately. At the same time you should remember that if over estimating is bad, under estimating is worse!
Distribution of time also requires experience and estimation of needs. Some subjects are more demanding than others and may require a larger share of time. More often a subject is taken in a week, the better chance it has of getting justice. Thus, if you propose to allot 3 hours per week to pediatrics, distribute it as half an hour per day or one hour every alternate day. Time allotted at one sitting, however should not be less than half and hour.
One problem that you often encounter when following a timetable is the rigidity that it includes. It is difficult to finish work in each subject at the exact moment the next subject is due. This can be taken care of by leaving a buffer time in between; however, we strongly advise against it. This gives a justification for not finishing work on time. It is better to allow the extension of one subject into another. The very fact that you are using medicine time to study surgery makes you feel uncomfortable and drives you to avoid such incursions except under genuine stress.

B. Recognize fatigue

Don't regard tiredness as something to be avoided. After an honest work, you ought to be tired; but be conscious of fatigue. Drowsiness and other symptoms of fatigue are nature's way of warning that rest is needed. If that warning is neglected, nature removes the symptoms and allows work to go on but at a price. The work may not suffer but you may. It is just like ignoring the reserve signal of a scooter and then end up walking all the way to the petrol pump. At the same time, don't keep on looking for the symptoms of fatigue-you may find them too easily.
A distinction must be made between boredom and fatigue. Boredom only comes when you lack interest although you are fresh and can do anything except reading that particular subject. In such cases, changing a subject is often as good as a rest period. Don't change it too frequently- you must learn to face the interesting in order to attain what is interesting.

C. Setting to Study

As you sit down to study, your effectiveness initially declines. This is because you are busy fighting all other interests that clamor for your attention. This phase is crucial and should not be confused with boredom otherwise you will end up changing subjects and books but not gaining anything meaningfully. Once you settle your account with matters that occupy your mind, effectiveness steadily increases. This goes on till fatigue counter balances your efforts and then again a fall starts.

D. Where to Study

There is a difference of opinion on this point. Some say that you should treat your body severely and put it into an uncomfortable position, then only your mind will concentrate. The other view is that the body should be as comfortable as possible so that the mind is free to work. Neither view can be pushed to extremity. The principle should be that the body should not make its presence felt either by comfort or discomfort as to call attention to itself.
A point that often comes up is can you relax and study at the same time. Many students share the positive view and it is not uncommon to see students lying comfortably on a Dunlop couch with a pack of chips in one hand and a cold drink in other and eyes on the book. Our answer would be probably no. Study involves a certain amount of tension and up to a level, the degree of performance is related to the degree of the tension generated. However, if you become too tensed, the level of performance falls.
Another point that often needs to be emphasized is that what you remember is not a carbon copy of what you study- rather you remember the results of your processing. In other words, more meaning and organization you find in a material, the better will be the retention. There is another reason for learning by rule rather than by role.

E. Manipulation of memory

Most, in fact all students complain about memory. However, the same students can rattle off everything about movies or fixtures. This discrepancy can be attributed to poor management of memory. Everyone is born with a fixed endowment of memory, which can't be altered, but one can definitely make a more efficient and purposeful use of his memory.
Many drugs including herbal ones are credited with improving memory; most of these claims are baseless and rely more on placebo effect rather than on actual benefit. Others like nicotine, caffeine, alcohol and amphetamine commonly taken by the students may do the trick by producing euphoria. Any attempt at improving memory by resorting to drugs is bound to end in futility and therefore must be avoided.
There are certain simple methods available to improve recapitulation of what you have studied. For this, it is important to make a distinction between reading and studying. We all have the experience of reading a book many times but not being able to recall what we have read.
Reading and re-reading a page is not important. What really matters is analyzing what is on the page, as thoroughly and deeply as possible. This is known as level of processing. The more deep processing you do, the better you are likely to remember. This requires a deliberate effort and time. Always remember that there are no short cuts to learning- you can't rush learning.
You should recognize what is known as practice effect and make full use of it. It is a common experience that once you start reading a new book, you find it uninteresting and difficult. On your second reading, it does not seem so difficult. This is practice effect. It has been scientifically proven that it persists for about 10 days. Therefore, sessions should be scheduled as frequently as possible to make full use of practice effect.

F. Recitation

If you have 6 hours to study and reading a chapter takes 2 hours then what would you do- read it 3 times? That could be a bad approach. Better would be to cut down the reading time to 2 hours and spend the remaining 4 hours in reciting (not verbatim, of course) what you have read.
Recitation is an age-old method for improving retention. It is one of the reasons, why most of us can still recall "Twinkle Twinkle little star" or "Baa Baa black sheep" because as children we used to recite them many times.
Recitation helps in more than one ways/ Firstly, it motivates because you know that you have to recite what you are learning. Secondly, it provides immediate feedback and tells you how well you have learnt and in which areas you are shaky. Thirdly, since you don't recite verbatim, you do some deep processing, further aiding memory. Lastly, it helps you to practice retrieval. You tend to store materials in such a way that you can readily call on it.

G. SQ3R Technique

A related technique for better retention and an exercise in deep processing is SQ3R. It is especially useful when reading a topic for the first time. It leads to better understanding, lasting associations, and better memory. Essentially, it consists of the following steps:
Survey: Give a quick glance to the topic/book to find out what it deals with, what is it's level of discussion, which areas have been discussed satisfactorily and which areas will need recourse to another book.
Question: When you survey, you will find yourself asking basic questions like why this topic has been given so much importance; why such and such aspect has been skipped; how much can I depend on this book; which areas can be skipped because I have already read them and so on.
Read: Having prepared yourself with this basic information set down to read. Try to find the meaning and organization of the material and do some deep processing.
Recite: After reading, close the book and try to recite what you have learnt.
Review: Go through the book again to check whether you could recite correctly. Go through the weak areas and then follow the cycle of read-recite-review till you have perfected the material.
Law of over learning states that you should not stop at the first perfect performance but continue to learn beyond that. If it took you 10 attempts to recite a paragraph correctly then recite it at least 15 times (i.e. 150% over learning) to remember it for a longer time. This law explains why we can still recall the story of Alice in Wonderland or some other fairy tale learnt in our childhood because we continued to hear them even after we remembered them.
Before concluding, we want to give you one more example that is from a movie, Gigi. There is an elderly couple celebrating their marriage anniversary. They recall their first meeting. She says that dinner was at 9, he was late and she wore a gown of gold. He says that dinner was at 8, he was on time and she wore blue. This sequence has been pictured in the song, I remember it well. There is no way of knowing who is right but they are in full agreement on what really counts- that the meeting led to a lifetime of happy affection. This is how your memory should be- not bogged down by unnecessary details yet accurate on what really matters.

H. Related Information

Principles of Medical Education Published by IAP Education Center, Copies of the book are available from Dr V K Paul, Secretary IAPEC,Dept.of Pediatrics,AIIMS,N Delhi - 110 029 ( INDIA )