

Since then, many students have opted to stay within the UWorld platform to create and review their flashcards. However, UWorld, the QBank leader for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK test preparation, recently launched its own Flashcards feature. Students have the flexibility to create their own cards and decks by importing pictures and charts as necessary.Īnki is often used in tandem with First Aid and the UWorld question bank (QBank) to make flashcard sets based on the material being reviewed in each resource.
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Anki’s popularity has largely been attributed to the fact that it is free to use and there are many high-quality flashcard decks available specifically for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2. which over the past decade has swept through medical schools as one of the best methods of implementing spaced repetition. Medical students worldwide have become hooked on spaced repetition flashcards, facilitated by the release of the Anki app in 2006 (Anki is the Japanese word for “memorization”). Essentially, taking the time to repetitively review flashcards over the course of a period of time lifts the “forgetting curve” so that students actually remember the information they have reviewed. This concept of spaced repetition has overtaken medical education as the best way to retain all that information needed to do well on the USMLE Step Exams. The second reason making flashcards is so important deals with the concept of spaced repetition which relies on reviewing flashcards at increasing intervals based on the difficulty of the card. Making your own flashcards instead of simply using a premade deck creates a learning activity that causes you to interact with the material you are trying to memorize and increases your retention rate. This is the first key part of why taking the time to create personalized flashcards on UWorld or elsewhere is so important.

To start, active learning, for those who may not be familiar, refers to any learning activity in which the student participates or interacts with the learning process (as opposed to passively taking in information).
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How to Make Memory Palaces in Medical School Why Flashcards Work for the USMLE Exams So, grab a fork and let’s talk UWorld flashcards ! Creating your own personalized flashcards provides a custom study resource tailored to your specific knowledge base and needs, and, when leveraged appropriately, flashcards can become your most valuable review resource that puts the icing on your hard earned USMLE study cake! As luck may have it, the popular USMLE qbank UWorld offers the ability to make flashcards right on their platform which is what we will be exploring in this post.

Through this research, the important concepts of “active learning” and “spaced repetition” were born.Īs you may have guessed, especially in medical school while studying for the USMLE exams, utilizing flashcards as an avenue for active learning and spaced repetition are major contributing factors to studying success. Over the last 30-40 years however, researchers have begun taking a closer look at the effectiveness of flashcards and other learning techniques. Did you know that flashcards have been around since at least the 1800’s when paper became widely available to the average student? Certainly, the use of flashcards to aid in the memorization of facts is no foreign concept to any of us in fact, I think most people remember making flashcards throughout their educational career (Or do they? Perhaps I am showing my age!) to memorize things like foreign languages and history facts.
