How to Study Medical School Exams | Quick Studying Tips For Medical Students | Tip #2: Productive Failure
In this video series, I present some useful studying tips for your medical school exams. All of the videos are backed by scientific evidence. In every video, I present a scientific information and then the tip.
Now we are at the second video. This video will provide you a brilliant and easy way to adapt your learnings to new situations by making productive failure.
These pretty flamingos are excited to explain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FxvmU_3R60
In a study that is published in 2019, pharmacy students were divided into two groups. The first group was “direct teaching” group, and the second group was “productive failure” group. The content that they should learn was calculating creatinine clearance. The experiment was carried out in three phases.
At the first phase, the formula developed for calculating creatinine clearance, called as Cockcroft–Gault formula, was provided to the first group and they instructed about calculation.
The formula was not provided to the second group and they were asked to evaluate the association between a few variables such as age, weight and creatinine concentration in urine to invent a formula. This process lasted forty minutes for both of the groups. While first group were getting instruction about the calculation without any effort, second group tried hard to invent the formula but they failed many times.
At the second phase of the experiment, forty minutes of the practice phase, both of the groups were provided the formula and they were asked to use the formula to answer multiple-choice questions. This was the first time that the second group saw the formula.
At the last phase, the assessment phase, both of the groups answered the same multiple choice questions. The questions were designed to assess use of three different levels of cognitive skills. Acquisition of knowledge, application of knowledge, adapting knowledge into new situation.
Here are the results. There is no difference between two groups in both for the acquisition questions, and application questions. But when we arrive at the questions that assess adapting the knowledge into new situations, we see that the second group outperformed the first group. That is why the second group can be called as “productive failure group”.
“These results emphasize the role of struggle in learning and support the theory that engaging students in solving problems that are beyond their abilities can be a productive exercise in failure.”
Here is the tip.
1. Start to READ OR WATCH THE CONTENT that you want to learn.
2. STOP immediately when YOU FIND A PROBLEM THAT CAN BE ANSWERED AHEAD of the content
3. TRY TO FIND IN YOUR MIND AS MANY POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS AS YOU CAN
4. Continue to READ OR WATCH it and get THE SOLUTION THAT IS PRESENTED IN THE CONTENT
Apply this process for every problem about the content.
So you can productively fail to adapt the knowledge into new situations better.
If you want to find more information about the scientific study that I mentioned, I left the source at the description below.
See you and adios para amigos!
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