Hey everyone,
I've had a few people ask me about ANKI so I wanted to make a post discussing how I used ANKI and why exactly I started using this method. Before starting I want to emphasise that ANKI, like other modalities of studying, should only form a part of your toolbox. There's plenty of other valid ways to study and it's important to assess how you can use those methods to best suit your needs and ideally maximise learning efficiency.
WHY?
Like many people my early studying focused a lot writing notes based off lectures. My approach, like others would be Watch lecture → Annotate lecture → Write notes → Review prior to exam.
The thing I found ineffective about this approach:
I'm not disregarding the method of dictation or copying notes from textbooks - this works for some people I know and they still do incredibly well. For me it's a cost benefit analysis - I know that I can learn the same amount of content albeit in a significantly shorter period of time.
ANKI
So now that I had discovered that writing notes was not really for me I needed another method by which to study. This is where I was lead to ANKI by a variety of resources (Youtube, Word of Mouth, etc.). ANKI is a flashcard based system where you construct cards and study them at your leisure and depending on how well, or how poorly, you answer the system repeats the card in an allotted period of time. This system is known as 'spaced repetition'. There is evidence to suggest that this works very well and often you retain a large amount of the content that you learn. Of course, this can be achieved with notes but I just found reading over notes was too passive of an exercise for me - I needed content phrased to me in a Q&A setting.
This system can be overwhelming so I'm to hoping to create a quick guide here that discusses some of the features of ANKI and how I went about structuring my decks, etc. I hope this helps people because I know it is this initial steep learning curve that turns most people off using ANKI.
Structuring a deck
There are two major sub-units of the ANKI card:
I don't recommend this approach as you end up generating large numbers of decks and this becomes really challenging to stay on top of.
Therefore I recommend 1 deck for the year. So this deck might be entitled "Pre-clinical Year 1" or "Clinical Year 2".
You might be wondering how you'd organise your deck if everything is mixed up! This is where tags come in. I'll detail how to utilise tags:
So structuring cards. I'm going to go through how I used each type of card. I mainly used the 'Cloze' deletion and the 'Basic' card. I made a modification to the basic card myself in ANKI creating a 'Basic explanation' card which hard a 3rd field where I provided information that I didn't necessarily want to memorise, but would be helpful contextual knowledge - e.g. I'd put tables in here, or some background information. Once you repeat the cards enough you'll find yourself memorising this knowledge anyway. If changing the card yourself seems challenging (and it can be when you start using ANKI) I'll explain below how you can get the same effect with the standard 'Basic' card.
The formats I listed above are the ones I used by far and large the most. There are other card types you can use - e.g. 'Image occlusion' is very useful when you're trying to learn anatomy and naming structures (e.g. preparing for a flag test in anatomy class).
The question I get asked a lot is how do you memorise complex physiological processes? The answer is two-fold
How often should I be revising my deck?
ANKI is not about just writing the cards and then leaving them. This is part of the issue that many users have. Once you make the cards make the effort to revise on a daily basis. If you're busy on a particular day just reduce the card limit for that day. Spaced repetition is how you retain this knowledge!
How many cards should you be doing a day?
However many you think is sustainable and you're willing to commit to on the daily! The key is PERSISTENCE & REPETITION. Don't set your review limit at 300 cards and your new daily limit at 100 if you know that isn't going to happen. On the other end, don't set it at 10 reviews a day if you feel like you're learning nothing. I generally set my limit at 20 new cards a day and a maximum of 100-150 reviews per day.
Should I use premade decks?
Australian-curriculum-specific decks really do not exist to the best of my knowledge, unless you can get a deck off a friend that used ANKI in the past themselves (ask year levels up). I wouldn't rely 100% on this though, make an effort to make your own cards too - the process itself helps you learn the content.
Now pre-made USMLE Step decks are abundant on the internet. I'd exercise caution here: Yes they have a lot of cards but often the content is not entirely relevant to our curriculum or is too specific to STEP exams. I think these decks can be useful to get your bearings around ANKI and how to structure cards. I think it is a good idea to download one to see how they structured their decks and how you can structure your own too. From my experience they tend to use a lot of cloze deletion cards, because to the best of my knowledge their written exams are all MCQs. This is different to use where we have SAQs too.
No harm in trialling them, but just use your discretion in assessing the content of the card and don't hesitate to delete cards that are too niche or irrelevant to our curriculum.
Other methods of learning
Like I said before ANKI is not the be all and end all. It is the the predominate study method I use but I still write concise notes, draw tables and flowcharts (which I incorporate into ANKI), listen to podcasts and watch youtube videos. I also use online MCQ bank resources to supplement my learning.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading all of this! I hope that this has provided you a good bearing on how to utilise ANKI to study effectively. I'd be happy to make this thread into a more Q&A style thing where you can ask questions and we can share ideas of how to structure decks, or good decks that you've stumbled across yourself. Please feel to ask questions.
I've had a few people ask me about ANKI so I wanted to make a post discussing how I used ANKI and why exactly I started using this method. Before starting I want to emphasise that ANKI, like other modalities of studying, should only form a part of your toolbox. There's plenty of other valid ways to study and it's important to assess how you can use those methods to best suit your needs and ideally maximise learning efficiency.
WHY?
Like many people my early studying focused a lot writing notes based off lectures. My approach, like others would be Watch lecture → Annotate lecture → Write notes → Review prior to exam.
The thing I found ineffective about this approach:
- There is a lot of content to cover so invariably you either ended up speeding through lectures, missing core detail, or you would just write dictations of what the lecturer had said, often getting to the end and retaining ~20% of what you wrote.
- It was difficult to review content. Again due to volume I think it's challenging to review content on a persistent basis - especially challenging topics. For me this was occurring because I was generally too focused on completing the lectures in front of me.
- Review generally only occurred right before exams.
- Epidemiology and Aetiology
- Pathophysiology
- Clinical features
- Diagnostics
- Treatment (+Side effects)
- Complications
I'm not disregarding the method of dictation or copying notes from textbooks - this works for some people I know and they still do incredibly well. For me it's a cost benefit analysis - I know that I can learn the same amount of content albeit in a significantly shorter period of time.
ANKI
So now that I had discovered that writing notes was not really for me I needed another method by which to study. This is where I was lead to ANKI by a variety of resources (Youtube, Word of Mouth, etc.). ANKI is a flashcard based system where you construct cards and study them at your leisure and depending on how well, or how poorly, you answer the system repeats the card in an allotted period of time. This system is known as 'spaced repetition'. There is evidence to suggest that this works very well and often you retain a large amount of the content that you learn. Of course, this can be achieved with notes but I just found reading over notes was too passive of an exercise for me - I needed content phrased to me in a Q&A setting.
This system can be overwhelming so I'm to hoping to create a quick guide here that discusses some of the features of ANKI and how I went about structuring my decks, etc. I hope this helps people because I know it is this initial steep learning curve that turns most people off using ANKI.
Structuring a deck
There are two major sub-units of the ANKI card:
- Deck
- Tag
I don't recommend this approach as you end up generating large numbers of decks and this becomes really challenging to stay on top of.
Therefore I recommend 1 deck for the year. So this deck might be entitled "Pre-clinical Year 1" or "Clinical Year 2".
You might be wondering how you'd organise your deck if everything is mixed up! This is where tags come in. I'll detail how to utilise tags:
- My tag had 2 components
- Firstly, what does this topic belong to - is this anatomy, physiology, neurology, etc. So the first part would be Physiology_
- Secondly, what is the specific sub-topic - is this a card discussing RAAS? Then the tag would read Physiology_RAAS
- After this you can continue to sub-classify but again I don't recommend but for some things it might be necessary. For example CKD complications are a big topic so you might do something like CKD_Complications_MBD if you please. I hardly ever used 3 parts to a tag though, it would have become overwhelming to monitor. I'd recommend sticking to 2.
- It meant I was ALWAYS studying my weaknesses. It didn't mean I could hide my lack of knowledge about X away by just focusing on decks I was good at. One deck forces you to do every card.
- It meant every card was different - instead of mindlessly flipping through cards all relating to one topic I had to stay focused because one card may have been about Diabetes, but the next card may have been about Vasculitis.
- I tagged everything meticulously because when it came to end of year revision I could focus on certain things by creating decks to those topics. So say, for example, you're not strong with ECGs by the end of the year and you feel okay with the rest of the stuff - then you just create a filtered deck that has all cards with the tag "Cardiology_ECG". This was a great way to do very specific study at the end of the year or before a specific rotation.
So structuring cards. I'm going to go through how I used each type of card. I mainly used the 'Cloze' deletion and the 'Basic' card. I made a modification to the basic card myself in ANKI creating a 'Basic explanation' card which hard a 3rd field where I provided information that I didn't necessarily want to memorise, but would be helpful contextual knowledge - e.g. I'd put tables in here, or some background information. Once you repeat the cards enough you'll find yourself memorising this knowledge anyway. If changing the card yourself seems challenging (and it can be when you start using ANKI) I'll explain below how you can get the same effect with the standard 'Basic' card.
- Cloze deletions. Cloze cards basically get you to write something out and then blank a part of it. So when you see the card it would look like "_ is an example of a Gram negative bacteria". I used these cards mainly for epidemiological facts or definitions of diseases. I didn't want to rote learn these facts but I wanted to have some understanding of their definition or prevalence and incidence so I'd be able to provide ball park figures if I was ever asked. On the back of the card feel free to write some contexualising stats, definitions or links, etc. Here is an example:
- Basic cards. The way I would structure these cards is that I'd ask myself a question using these cards - e.g. "What are risk factors for X conditions?", "What diagnostics are important in Y", etc. On the back of the card I'd provide the answer and some explanation. If you don't know how to create custom cards, that's ok! To separate your answer from your "explanation" just put the explanatory notes in a different colour. As you can see below the "explanation" segment of the card contained a visual representation of the cortices and which segments where supplied by which artery. Here's an example:
The formats I listed above are the ones I used by far and large the most. There are other card types you can use - e.g. 'Image occlusion' is very useful when you're trying to learn anatomy and naming structures (e.g. preparing for a flag test in anatomy class).
The question I get asked a lot is how do you memorise complex physiological processes? The answer is two-fold
- I still use the basic card but I list the answer in steps! This is really important because when making the card I have to consciously think about how to divide the physiology into logical steps. Hint: Do not just copy and paste your notes into ANKI! This is not the purpose, actively think about making your cards and structure them in a way where you will memorise the content. I see plenty of people just copy and pasting their notes into ANKI. ANKI is not meant for learning slabs of text. It's up to you to condense that knowledge into bite-sized chunks and process it. Here's an example:
- A second format is audio cards - you can actually just record yourself discussing the steps and then this is played back once you flip the card. I haven't used this method but I can definitely see it being handy, especially for topics which are unlikely to come up in written exams but may come up in the OSCE setting. These cards would also be useful for "Compare and contrast" style questions - e.g. "Compare and contrast the features of delirium and dementia".
How often should I be revising my deck?
ANKI is not about just writing the cards and then leaving them. This is part of the issue that many users have. Once you make the cards make the effort to revise on a daily basis. If you're busy on a particular day just reduce the card limit for that day. Spaced repetition is how you retain this knowledge!
How many cards should you be doing a day?
However many you think is sustainable and you're willing to commit to on the daily! The key is PERSISTENCE & REPETITION. Don't set your review limit at 300 cards and your new daily limit at 100 if you know that isn't going to happen. On the other end, don't set it at 10 reviews a day if you feel like you're learning nothing. I generally set my limit at 20 new cards a day and a maximum of 100-150 reviews per day.
Should I use premade decks?
Australian-curriculum-specific decks really do not exist to the best of my knowledge, unless you can get a deck off a friend that used ANKI in the past themselves (ask year levels up). I wouldn't rely 100% on this though, make an effort to make your own cards too - the process itself helps you learn the content.
Now pre-made USMLE Step decks are abundant on the internet. I'd exercise caution here: Yes they have a lot of cards but often the content is not entirely relevant to our curriculum or is too specific to STEP exams. I think these decks can be useful to get your bearings around ANKI and how to structure cards. I think it is a good idea to download one to see how they structured their decks and how you can structure your own too. From my experience they tend to use a lot of cloze deletion cards, because to the best of my knowledge their written exams are all MCQs. This is different to use where we have SAQs too.
No harm in trialling them, but just use your discretion in assessing the content of the card and don't hesitate to delete cards that are too niche or irrelevant to our curriculum.
Other methods of learning
Like I said before ANKI is not the be all and end all. It is the the predominate study method I use but I still write concise notes, draw tables and flowcharts (which I incorporate into ANKI), listen to podcasts and watch youtube videos. I also use online MCQ bank resources to supplement my learning.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading all of this! I hope that this has provided you a good bearing on how to utilise ANKI to study effectively. I'd be happy to make this thread into a more Q&A style thing where you can ask questions and we can share ideas of how to structure decks, or good decks that you've stumbled across yourself. Please feel to ask questions.
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