Medical Study Glossary
Essential concepts for mastering high-stakes exams. Understand the science behind how you learn.
Active Recall
A learning principle where you stimulate your memory for a piece of information during the learning process, as opposed to passively reviewing it.
Spaced Repetition
A learning technique that uses increasing intervals of time between reviews of learned material to exploit the psychological spacing effect for long-term recall.
Metacognition
Awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes; essentially "thinking about thinking".
USMLE
The United States Medical Licensing Examination, a three-step examination for medical licensure in the United States.
Anki
A free and open-source flashcard program that uses spaced repetition, widely used by medical students for memorization.
Cognitive Load Theory
A theory that suggests learning is hampered when working memory capacity is exceeded.
Forgetting Curve
A hypothesis that describes the decline of memory retention in time. It shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it.
Ease Hell
A state in Anki where a card's Ease Factor drops so low that the algorithm schedules it for review excessively often, causing study inefficiency.
Interleaving
A study technique where students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study, in order to improve their learning.