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Health & Fitness

Hitting The Books: "Why Didn't I Do Better on my Tests if I Knew the Material Really Well?"

As an educational therapist, many medical students me, "Why didn't I do better on my tests if I knew the material really well?"

Our newest blogger, Loren Deutsch, is the founder and executive director of Loren Academic Services. The company provides in-home tutoring and academic coaching for students in kindergarten through graduate school.

The amount of reading required in medical school is daunting, to say the least. For students that stay on top of their reading, there is nothing more frusturating than doing poorly on an eam that they felt felt they were well-prepared for. As an educational therapist, I'm often asked “Why didn’t I do better on my tests if I knew the material really well?”

This is a great question and the fact is there are all kinds of reasons why students at all levels underperform on tests - especially important tests like final exams or standardized exams.

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At most ages and levels, people have a process they have adopted so they can read and prepare for a test. The process of reading for test preparation typically looks different from student to student and is much different than reading for pleasure. In both cases, there are some students for whom the process of reading is so challenging that it is avoided at all costs. However, there are others who simply don’t know how to prepare effectively for tests due to common misconceptions about reading. 

Over the next few weeks, I am going to explore some of the strategies in test preparation: those that work, those that don’t work well enough, and those that have been proven less effective over time.  For now I want to focus on the pitfalls of reading to memorize rather than reading to learn.

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The idea of reading to memorize is actually a preliminary step in the learning but it is not a sufficient step in learning. Memorizing is simply not enough. Compared to memorization, understanding implies a deeper level of knowledge with new material. A student can reread the material all night in an effort to memorize the material but the student will not make rich associations with the text. This often results in underperformance on exams.

Simply put, reading to memorize has limitations; it is a skill that only works well up to a certain point in school.  As reading becomes more theoretical and complex (new ideas, lots of details, abstract concepts, etc.) the more time is required to get through the material. If the student is relying on memorizing the material for a test, it can quickly become an endeavor of diminishing returns. There is only about a day’s worth of time in which new information will remain in a student’s short-term memory. Additionally, the space available for that short-term memory is limited. 

Cramming is rarely as effective as one thinks.

With the limitations of reading for memorization in mind, check back next week when I detail some reading strategies that help facilitate a much deeper level of learning.

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