How to Ace your Exams : The Method to Mastery

1. Welcome!: Hey guys, it's Mike and Matty and welcome to the Method to Mastery. In this course we'll be teaching you how to study for exams. In order for us to be good doctors and take better care of our patients, we have to stay up to date with medicine at all times and this means we have to study and take tests for the rest of our lives. Yeah but it doesn't mean that studying needs to consume our lives or your life. At first, it was a struggle for us because no one really teaches you how to study in school. It took years and years of trial and error before we were able to put together the system that got us better grades but our Method to Mastery doesn't just get you better grades. It actually allows you to study less. Think of all the other things we've been able to do with our free time: DJ and music production, start a YouTube channel, start a business. Right? Yeah. Mike got his real estate license and started investing during residency. You won't find any other course out there quite like ours because we teach you how to study efficiently and unlike random YouTube videos, we actually teach you how to apply study tips and walk you through step-by-step. Our method works for any test. Next time you think about paying $5 thousand for a test prep course, think about us, our course is free. The point is, we've figured out how to study effectively and efficiently and we can't wait to share it with you. 2. Introduction: We designed the method of mastery to follow three rules. These are the three golden rules of studying for exams. Focus on what you need to know. The more brain power you use, the better the information will stick. Practice exactly like how we will be tested on the day of the exam. We've conveniently organized the method of mastery into three easy steps. One step for each rule. These steps are planning, processing and practicing. Step 1 is planning. You want to plan carefully so that you only study what you will be tested on. You don't want to waste your time studying things that don't matter. Step 2 is processing. We will teach you specific study strategies that will force you to use as much brain power as possible. You got to challenge yourself because the harder you force your brain to process the information, the better it will stick. Step 3 is practicing. You have to practice exactly like how you'll be tested. If you're taking an essay tests, you need to write essays. If you're taking a multiple choice test, you need to do multiple choice practice problems. Those are the three steps that correspond to the three golden rules. Now, let's see how all these fit into the bigger picture. This diagram will show you exactly how the method of mastery works. Don't worry, we'll be teaching you the step-by-step in the upcoming chapters. For now, just sit back and try to understand the big picture.This huge pile over here represents all the stuff that you've been given to learn for your test. The reading you need to do, the review questions you need to do and the practice tests that you need to take. It's a lot of info, but that's what planning is for. In step 1, you'll be sifting through the pile and picking out exactly what resources you need and planning out exactly how you'll be using them and studying from them every day in a detailed way. Once you've planned everything out, next is the processing step, where you'll be absorbing and taking all this information into your brain. You'll be processing the information in such a way that you will understand it. Remember, the harder you force your brain to process, the better the info will stick. The best tool to use for this step is RemNote. RemNote is a note taking program that automatically converts what you right down into flashcards, which you can later use to practice. For step 3, once the information is in your brain, you will practice retrieving that information at will. Getting the information into your brain isn't the hard part. The hard part is retrieving that information from your brain and using it when you take your test, applying the information. This is why it's so important to practice exactly how you will be tested. The best tools to use for this section are, you review questions, practice tests, and again, RemNote. Here's how our study course will be organized. We'll start by showing you how to plan before a test. After that, we're going to dive into a complete guide on how to get started with RemNote. If you're already familiar with RemNote, feel free to skip over this section. Then after that, we'll go over a systematic approach on how to process information, lectures and textbooks. Finally, we'll wrap it up by talking about how to practice using flashcards and practice questions. This is the overall framework to the method to mastering. You'll see that we've broken down our course to address each of these steps. 3. The Science of Study: So when you study, you only want to be using the most effective study methods. Techniques like active recall, space repetition, interleaving, and strategies like fine man, burrito and SQ3R. That's why in our method to mastery, we use tools like Rem Note. Now in the past, our method used a program called Anki, and Anki would certainly still work here. But we think Rem Note, it's just so much more powerful, and don't worry, if you're not familiar with Rem Note will be doing an in depth tutorial on how to use it later on in this course. Now, what's just as important as using the best study methods is avoiding the worst study methods, such as reading a textbook multiple times, rewatching a lecture that you've already seen or rereading and highlighting your notes. Yeah, the way to spend less time studying, but still get better results is by only using the best scientifically proven methods and not wasting your time on the inefficient strategies. We have designed the method mastery to do exactly that. We've laid out the road map for you. We've put in the years of work and done the trial and error, and we've taken out all the guesswork. All you have to do, is follow our method step- by- step. One last thing, we're not going to waste your time diving into the science behind why these are the best study methods. We're here to teach you how to execute on them, take action, and get results. But if you are interested in the science, we'll leave links for you below. 4. The Planning Phase: So step one is planning. What we'll be doing in this step is gathering resources, creating a study schedule, and planning your daily routine. At the end of this, you'll know exactly what you need to do and when you'll need to do it. All right, so let's get started with the planning section and we'll see you in the next chapter. 5. (Planning) Gathering Resources: This chapter is about gathering resources, finding textbooks, practice questions, slides, any materials that you'll need. There's a lot of information out there. So we're going to help you find the right resources for your specific test. Gathering materials is pretty straightforward. Put in a little bit of work before studying to make sure that you're using the best possible tools to prepare for your upcoming exams. But obviously we can't predict what you'll need for each class since we aren't taking your class. Instead, we'll just provide advice from our personal experiences to help you make the right choice in which resources to use. First, let's talk about studying for a class. There are two incredibly useful resources here. Your professor and your upperclassmen. Your professor is going to be making the exam. So why not go straight to the source? Ask for all the material coming from for your exam, and definitely ask if they have old exams, practice tests, or practice questions. And don't count on your upperclassmen. They've taken the class already. Ask them how they prepared for the exams, what resources they used and what not to use. Most of the time, everything you need will be given in presentation slides, but if you're also given textbook assignments or supplemental reading, then ask if there'll be testable information that's not included in the presentation slides. And if you have time after going over all the high-yield info, then you can take a look at the optional stuff. Focus on what you need to know. Next, we'll talk about standardized tests. There are a few resources to definitely consider here. First, is getting a review book that is specific for your test from a notable test prep company. An example of this would be Kaplan or Princeton Review. You don't need to get more than one as long as it includes all the information you need. It's just not necessary. Stick with one, and learn it inside and out. Next, you'll want to get question banks and practice tests. This is separate from your test prep review book because frankly, many of them don't give you practice questions. Just like how you want to pick just one review book and focus on learning it inside and out, you just wanna pick one question bank and stick with it. Also make sure your question banks come with full explanations for each question, including why the right answers are right and why the wrong answers are wrong. It's super important to have explanations to make sure you're learning everything correctly. Finally, it can be very useful to find videos to help you learn. Sometimes hearing a topic taught from different sources can be helpful for your understanding. For example, we, as medical students, use Boards and Beyond, and Osmosis. Those ones aren't free though, and they're subscription-based, but there are free options like Khan Academy or just check out YouTube. That about wraps it up for gathering materials. Remember the golden rule of this step is to focus on what you need to know. We don't want to waste our energy or time studying irrelevant information, or getting lost in the weeds. Now that you have all the materials that you need, you're ready to create your study plan. Join us in the next chapter. 6. (Planning) The Study Plan: All right. We have all of our study materials and now we're ready to create our study plan. Keep in mind that we'll be making one study plan for every test that we take. One study plan per test. Don't worry, this doesn't take very long. It usually takes about 15-20 minutes, definitely it shouldn't take you longer than an hour to prepare a plan for any test. Let's look at our study plan blueprint. It outlines that general schematic you should follow while you're preparing for your exam. We say general, because we can't account for all the variability in everyone's schedule. For example, if you're studying for a college or grad school mid-term, then your exam date is predetermined and your schedule is pretty much laid out in your syllabus. On the other hand, you have a little bit more control when it comes to standardized tests, because you get to choose your test dates and you get to choose how much time to give yourself to study. But in understanding these differences, you'll see that planning a study schedule for any test follows the same overarching blueprint. To start, get yourself a calendar, I personally like to use digital calendars. Examples would be Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, Notions are a pretty good one. But I like digital because I can keep it on my phone and I can refer to it whenever I want to. But some people like to write things down. Getting a planner or a notebook would be another great idea. Whatever floats your boat. First you want to know how many days you have before your exam. If you have any obligations or days you know, you won't be able to study, then you'll be able to adapt your study plan around those days because, life happens. Next, you'll determine how much new information you'll be learning every day. This is how much processing you'll be doing, which is going through your information for the first time. Basically, you're dividing the number of lectures or chapters that you need to learn by the number of days before your exam. If you're taking classes or studying for in-class exams, then this step is pretty easy, because your professor has most likely already laid the entire curriculum out for you. Just pull out your course syllabus and take a look. If you're taking multiple courses at the same time, then now is the time to pull out the syllabus for every class so that you can consolidate all your lectures into one central calendar. But making a calendar for a standardized tests is a little different. Let's go through an example together. Let's say you're studying for the MCAT or the LSAT, or whichever standardized tests you're taking. You should have already gotten a review book and practice questions for your specific test. Go ahead and pull those out and let's put together your calendar. I'm going to use my review book for this example. Over here, these are all the chapters that I need to learn in the processing phase. For standardized tests, as we mentioned, you get to make your own schedule, and you decide where to put these chapters on your calendar. What I recommend you do is the process every single day as early on as possible so that you get through all the chapters as fast as possible. This way you can leave a week or two weeks at the tail end of your timeline to really focus on practicing and reviewing anything that you struggle with. Because you don't want to be processing new information so close to your actual test day. Lastly, you want to make sure you set aside time each day for the practicing phase, which includes doing flashcards and any practice questions that you might have. For standardized tests, you've got to have practice questions. Let's talk about flashcards. Remnant flashcards use space repetition, which works most effectively if you practice them every single day. The way that space repetition software works is that it'll automatically show you more of the flashcards that you don't know that well. It'll show you less of the ones that you do know very well, and this is an efficient use of your time. But it only works if you practice your cards every day. Because the space repetition software needs frequent data to calculate what flashcards that show you next. Even just doing a few flashcards every day is way better than doing none at all. Now let's talk about the practice questions. For your standardized tests, you should have decided on one practice question bank to study for your exam. You should also have at least one, preferably two entire practice tests. For this step, you want to count how many questions you need to go through. Ideally, you want to get through the entire bank two times over it, which means that you'll be seeing every single question twice. The second pass-through will be much quicker because you'll be more familiar with information. But it's also really important because it'll help you solidify the information and will help you identify any weaknesses. On your timeline and easy rule of thumb would be to divide your total number of days into thirds. Try to schedule in a way that you can get through the entire question bank in the first two-thirds of your days after you're done, reset, and then for the last one third tried to get through the entire question bank again. Okay, let's talk about practice tests. You want to try to take your first practice tests as soon as you get through all of your processing. In this example, it will probably be one of these days. Set aside that day and try to make it feel as close to the actual test as possible, and if your test is timed, use a timer. Then after that, you can plan to take your second practice test sometime in between here, I would shoot for halfway in between your first practice tests and the actual day of the test. That's pretty much it. One thing I want you to realize is that you will fall behind on either your processing phase or doing daily practice questions, no matter how hard you try, life happens. But if you do your flashcards every single day, one minute here, one minute there. While you're in line, while you're in the elevator or wherever. As long as you do them every single day, you can retain the knowledge that you've already learned and then not fall off course completely. Those are the three general rules of our study plan blueprint. You want to figure out how many days you have until the tests. You want to decide which days you'll be learning new information, and then you'll be allocating the rest of your time to practicing each day. That's how you make a study plan. As you can see, it doesn't take much time. Once you're done planning, you're ready to start processing, to practicing. Realize that you will actually be processing and practicing at the same time. Every day you will be doing a little bit of reading and a few practice questions. The goal is to get through all of your reading and processing as fast as possible, so that you can spend the most time practicing. The reason many students struggle is that they spent too much time processing and not enough time practicing. Make sure that the last few days leading up to your tests, you won't have to do any reading and you'll only be practicing. 7. (Planning) Daily Routine: Now that you had your study plan figured out, you know exactly how many days until the test and how much you need to study each day. In this chapter, we're going to break it down even further and plan out what each day might look like. We're just trying to take out as much of the guesswork as possible. We all live different busy lives. So we want to create a daily schedule that is adaptable to our study plan. You've already determined if you need to learn new information each day. Now we want to break it down even further and actually block out time during the day to complete our studies. Give yourself a clear deadline. Block out X amount of time to process new information, and then block out X amount of time to do your flashcards and practice questions. Take out as much of the guesswork as possible, for when to study, so that when you actually sit down your lesser focused on the task at hand. Initially, you might want to be more generous, but how much time you block out. This is helpful to figure out how much time you actually need to spend, because it's always easier to remove time in a day then to add time. Also don't forget to add in breaks like exercising or socializing with friends. Having little incentives to complete your study sessions, can serve as a powerful motivator. Let's take a look at an example of a daily schedule here. Here's the template we use to plan out a day when we have to work. As you can see, I planned out when I was going to wake up, when I was going to be at work and then I have two separate study sessions divided by a break. Depending on how I felt after work, I could even do both of those studies sessions back-to-back and then take the night off. We want to try to plan the studying around our schedule, not the other way around. It's a good idea to have a few different templates for unexpected occasions that aren't part of our normal routine, because inevitably there are going to be days where we'll be busy. Like say, I'll be attending a party tomorrow night. Well, I know what material I need to finish from the study plan, so I'll use a different template for today that's a little heavier on the study. I'll make a time investment today to get ahead, so tomorrow I can go out and enjoy the night you are free. You obviously don't have to use our daily routine templates, although you're welcome too, anything on your phone work. Remember, our daily schedule is meant to be flexible. There's no need to make super strict hard rules on your schedule if something unexpected comes up, like getting a flat tire or a power outage. Unless doing so is going to help you achieve your study goals. Because hopefully just having this loose goal-oriented schedule is enough to keep you honest and accountable. Once you get better at managing your time, you'll find that you can really incorporate studying into everyday tasks. Like whenever you go to the bathroom, you can whip out and do some flashcards, when you're waiting in line at the grocery store, when you're on the commute to work on the bus or something, just know that one of the goals of the daily routine is to take out as much of the guesswork as possible, help you manage your time and incase you into a rhythm of studying. That concludes the planning phase. As you're just starting out. It might seem pretty tedious efforts, but stick with it. Because over time, the more tests you take and the more funny plans you create, you'll become so familiar with the study schedules that you eventually won't even need to rely on our study plan blueprints anymore. But until then, stick with it. Knowing exactly what you need to do day-by-day makes studying way less stressful. 8. RemNote Tutorial 1 : Basics: Hey, guys. It's Mike and Matty. This is the first video of our RemNote tutorial series. The best place to start would be to explain how RemNote is organized. The two most important terms you'll need to understand are parents and children. These terms are used to describe two kinds of relationships between your ideas. Let's use an example while we start to explain. The first relationship would be describing two things as components. Let's say that you're learning about human anatomy in class. The parent term we'll use will be the human body. Human body. Okay. The children would all be components of the human body. Organs like heart, stomach, and bones, for example. Parents can have many children, but the children can also be parents. You can break down the idea of heart even further. Children of the heart, for example, would be, right ventricle, atria, what else? Aorta? Oh, aorta. That's a good one. Then, you can break down those even further. Like right ventricle can be broken down to the papillary muscles, the tricuspid valve. You get the idea. You can keep breaking down these ideas into their individual components until they're at their most basic parts. The second relationship would be relating two things as different types. Let's use the human body again as an example. A child of the parent, as we saw earlier, would be bones, but there are many different types of bones, like skull, humerus, and femur, just to name a few. So together, these two relationships help organize the full picture of your studies, and we've just given you two examples of how we've been using RemNote to study medicine and the human body. But of course, as you familiarize yourself with RemNote, you'll decide for yourself how you want to use these tools to best fit your learning style. Parent and child, these are the basic building blocks of RemNote, and once you grasp this idea, you can see that it actually applies to the entire organization of RemNote. In the left toolbar, you can make folders by clicking these three-dashed lines here and adding a folder. Inside these folders, you can put multiple documents that you think should be grouped together. The folder is the original parent and the documents are the children. Documents can also be created in the left toolbar by pressing on the icon here in the folder that you're working in or by pressing on the screen where it says "Add a Document To This Folder". You can create document inside the document inside the document, as you please. Once inside a document, you can continue categorizing ideas using the two relationships that we demonstrated above. Each time an idea is broken down inside a document, we indent the line. Everything in the same indent then becomes the child of the previous line which serves as the parent. You can visualize how many lines are nested under the parent chain by the line that extends from the parent downward or you can toggle the parent open or close as you need by pressing this right here, then the indented child can serve as another parent to the next indent, and so on and so forth, and you can see that this chain keeps going. Indenting is done by pressing the Tab key on your computer. To reverse the direction of an indent, you press Shift plus Tab. That way, you can easily move ideas around depending on which parent they belong to, and clicking and dragging on the bullets will also work. So as you can imagine, the further you break down a topic, the more crowded and cluttered your screen will get, and you might have a hard time tracing your ideas back to their parents. There's a nice trick to help with this. Just like how you can click into a document on your computer, you can click on any bullet point, document, or folder and it will enter the specific page in the hierarchy, so you can keep your workspace more open while still visualizing the breadcrumbs. This helps you trace back information to its original folder or giving you a blank canvas to continue adding to your notes. To reiterate, the goal of RemNote's hierarchy is to organize your information into smaller bits so you can understand how every idea is related to each other. Think of it like making a table of contents while you study. Big sections are broken down into their smaller elements to help you organize studying. Then, these are automatically turned into flashcards with space repetition. It will show you that in the next section. 9. RemNote Tutorial 2 : Making Flashcards: Hey guys, it's Mike and Mattie and this is the second video in the RemNote tutorial series. In this one, we're talking about how to make flashcards and RemNotes and using them to study.Now that we've covered the overarching hierarchy of RemNote and how to organize your notes, let's dive into the meat, which is actually making the flashcards. At this point, we need a little bit more terminology that's specific to RemNote. So all the notes you write down and documents, are collectively known as your knowledge base. Additionally, you can turn anything in your knowledge base into a Rem, which is basically a flashcard. And like flashcards, each Rem has two sides, a front side and a backside. The front side of the Rem is the Rem's name and the backside of the Rem is the Rem's content. Example time. So now I'm just in a document and the document is just today's date. So to make a Rem, all you have to do is separate the name and content with two colons. Cool. You can make a few different kinds of Rem, but there are two main ones which we'll cover in this video; Concepts and Descriptors. The name of the concept Rem will be shown bolded, and it's created by starting off the line with a capital letter. Watch this. It automatically bolded the word I wrote after writing two colons. Signifying that I wanted to make this Rem a concept. So next, descriptor,the name of the descriptor Rem will be shown italicized and conversely, this is created by starting off a line with a lowercase letter, followed by the two colons. The content or everything that comes after the two colons can be formatted however you wish. It's the other side of the flashcard. In general, I like to make the concept Rems, the parent terms and I use the descriptive Rems as the children of parents, because you want them to be describing the concepts. Every time you create a Rem, it automatically generates flashcards. To preview what your flashcards are going to look like, just hover your cursor over the button toolbar. And you'll notice that two flashcards appear, a forwards and backwards flashcard. So either you use active recall to fill in the name or the content of the Rem. You can choose whether or not you want a specific Rem to be turned into both flashcards, the forward or backward one, by toggling the checkbox on the toolbar. As you can see, each Rem also shows you the hierarchy trail that it was created from, giving you contexts for each flash card that you make. You'll never study a Rem and wonder when the heck did I make that card or what is this? I am going to briefly finish covering the bottom toolbar since our attention is already down there.The two tabs to the right of the practice tabs show you what kind of Rem you're working with. We've already discussed the two main ones, the concepts and descriptors and we'll cover the other ones in a later video. The triangle symbol, allows you to add your Rem to a queue that you can add up later if you don't want to do that at that moment. This can also be found at the top left of the screen in case you forget. Then you have a couple of tabs that allow you to customize the font and color and choose what your bullets are going to look like. You can toggle the entire toolbar with the double arrows here and then you have the "portal search box" which allows you to search through any Rem you've ever created. You can then import that Rem into your current document as a portal. We'll cover this more extensively in the linking ideas video. Let's study some Rem so we can also see how the space repetition works. To study a Rem, just click on the "queue" button at the top left. Your Rem will appear in random order from your queue. Try to answer the Rem by using active recall first. Then press any key to show the answer, which also brings up your options for space repetition. If you hover your cursor over any of the icons, you can also see what they do and the hotkeys associated. This is just to help you speed up your workflow. Basically, the left four options are for editing your cards, and the right for options are for space repetition. The "edit later" button is a really cool feature that many of us take for granted. Let's say that you run into a card that you want to edit but you're studying your flashcards on the go, on your mobile device. If you stop to edit it, then, a) it disrupts your flow of running through your cards and b) it is especially cumbersome to edit typing on your phone. So this feature allows you to add flashcards to an edit queue where you can later go home to your computer and edit it more efficiently. Now, onto the right side. If you know a Rem really well, then press the "smiley face" or "L". If you knew it but you struggle, press the "neck face" or "colon" and if you've got got, hit the "frowning face" or "k". Using a built in algorithm, RemNote will automatically space out how often you see each Rem based on which face you pressed on. So if you hit the frowny face, then you'll see that Rem a lot more frequently than if you hit the happy face. The question mark button is for when you accidentally reveal the answer and it will shuffle that card back into your queue. At this point, you cannot yet changed the intervals of how often you see the cards, but we hope to see you this featured included in an upcoming update. Now let's look at the top. If you want to go back to your last flashcard, you can press the arrow at the left. As you practice, your queue will drop so that you can track your progress and see how many RemNote left. While you study your Rem, you'll also notice a green meter that fills across the top. This represents your daily flashcard goal, which you can customize in the settings. Reach this goal and you'll add to your daily streak and enjoy some hard-earned fireworks. The final thing I want to point out is that, the queue at the top-left contains all of your Rem and every document you've ever made. But sometimes you don't need to study everything and you only want to practice from a certain folder or a document. You can certainly do that, Just open the folder or document you want to practice from and then press the three dashes on the top right of the screen, and you can customize your study session to your liking. There was a tone of information in this video, so hopefully you're following along, but feel free to go back and re-watch any part of that you missed. Thanks for watching. Leave any comments below if you have any thoughts or questions, and we'll see you in the next one. 10. RemNote Tutorial 3 : Customizing Rem: Hello and welcome back. This is the third video of the series and we'll be showing you how to customize your rem so you can better organize your notes and your ideas. First are multiple lines in lists. These features are super handy for visualizing your notes and adding structure. When you study, you're very likely to come across topics that have more than one response or answer. For example, in medicine, you might make a concept rem for obstructive lung diseases, which is shown here by either typing in a capital letter first or changing the rem descriptor from the bottom toolbar. There are many different obstructive lung diseases like bronchitis, emphysema, asthma. Instead of just using a normal rem, where all of your text is displayed on the same line, I can make a multiple line rem by using three colons. This adds all the responses in separate lines. What's nice about the multiple line rem is that, it'll now show all the answers to this rem at the same time when you study. This helps declutter your document while still giving all the answers at once. The list rem will instead present answers in the rem, one at a time in a numerical list format. This is a nice way to display your notes so that text isn't all jumbled together. You have spaces in between. To make a list type colon one. List rem are useful for things that have a step-wise progression. For example, in medicine, a lot of times the guidelines for certain treatment or protocols follows a flowchart. I might make a rem called protocol for unconscious patient. This will be in a numerical list format, starting with one, assess scene safety and two, check patients ABC's, which are airway breathing circulation. Three, check for verbal response, and four, check for painful stimulus response. You get the idea, you go down a checklist and when you study this rem flashcard, each step will be shown sequentially. It can also be helpful to add a mnemonic here as well, because lists are just notoriously challenging to remember. Next up is cloze. Basically, you turn any component of your rem into a fill-in-the-blank flashcard by putting it into a cloze. To do this, highlight whichever part of your texts you want to be tested on and press the hotkeys, Control Shift open bracket, and then you'll see the specific term become underlined. If you hover your cursor over the bottom toolbar, you can preview your rem and you'll see that the cloze card has been created. Next, adding media into rem note is easy too. To bring up all your media import options. Simply type forward slash anywhere. You can add images, links, audio, you name it, and the hotkeys to add them are also displayed if you prefer that method. My personal favorite way to insert media is to copy and paste, or literally just drag them over. It's so quick and easy. Finally, let's talk about some general cosmetic options that are available in rem note, you can select any text in display or editing options for the text. These include the standard bold, underline, italicize, along with several highlighted colors. Additionally, you can turn it into a reference, tag or a cloze, and also brings up a search function for all the instances of that text. Dark mode can be toggled on and off in the settings. Just click the cogwheel at the bottom left and navigate to the visual section to check or uncheck that option. There are loads of other settings that you can try out for yourself, which we're not going to cover in this video. Definitely scroll through them and personalize your rem note interface. All right, if you miss anything, feel free to go back and watch it again. Don't forget we left timestamps in the description. If you have any comments, please leave them below. Thanks for watching. 11. RemNote Tutorial 4: The Sidebar: Let's look a little deeper into the sidebar. The sidebar is home base. There's a lot to cover and I'll start from the top and work downwards. So this is the homepage and clicking on the RemNote masthead or the documents on the sidebar will direct you back to this screen. You can organize all your documents by date created or updated, and further classify them as finished or pinned, which will show up in the toggles of the sidebar. You can create a new document up here, or a new document with today's date next to it, and these buttons are also available in the sidebar. Clicking on your username allows you to change your password or log out of your account. Queue will start a study session of all the rem you'd ever created, and the number next to it shows you how many cards are in your cube. By default, all your documents will appear in the draft toggle of the sidebar, unless it was checked as pinned or finished. For example, I'll click on the "New Document" button, name it Test one, and now you'll see it shows up in the draft section. To avoid too much clutter in the sidebar, It's best to put your documents into folders, which can then be collapsed. You can visualize the hierarchy of your folders and documents and rearrange them as you please in the sidebar, and finally, I'll briefly touch on the bottom of the toolbar. Here, you can quickly access the RemNote tutorials, view your stats, contact the RemNote team or view the About Us page which has information about updates, Twitter and some other resources as well. The cogwheel is for your settings and hovering your cursor over any of the bottom toolbar items will reveal what they do. Alright, that's the sidebar. Learn to love it. It's going to help you immensely to get the hang of navigating through RemNote. 12. RemNote Tutorial 5: The Queue: Let's look at different ways we can study flashcards in Remnote. The first and most basic way is to click queue in the sidebar. This will begin a study session of all the Rem in your entire knowledge base. For more focused study, you can click on the same icon beside the appropriate folder or document you wish to study from. This can also be achieved while inside a folder or document by pressing on the three dots at the top right of the screen and selecting practice Rem in this document. You see two options to study your Rem. Choosing with space repetition will be the same as clicking on the icon in the sidebar. This is the one that I use the most often. That's because I want to make use of the spaced repetition software. Now if you choose practice without spaced repetition, this will instead make a study session of all the Rem in your current document. So you can study the same Rem over and over if you want to. Whereas practicing with spaced repetition will create a study session with only the rem in the current document that are also in your queue. So a very quick demonstration of this. I have five rem in this current document called Queue. Now I'm going to study them with spaced repetition. So I'm just going to answer all five of them really quick. You can see that if I use with spaced repetition again, it will say that I have no cards left to study. That's because those cards were in my queue. Now that I've finished my queue, they won't show up. However, if I use without space repetition, I'll see those cards again and just so you're aware, practicing without space repetition is slightly a misnomer because spaced repetition stats still do apply. However, you're recreating a pile of cards over and over, meaning you're applying space repetition to those cards over and over again. So for example, if you studied the same document without spaced repetition, ten times in a row, when you study your queue, tomorrow from your sidebar, you probably won't see those cards because you've pushed those cards ten times back using the space repetition software. I really only find myself using the without space repetition when I'm cramming or preparing for an exam I have tomorrow. But otherwise, I would use the regulator with spaced repetition because that is the more consistent way to learn the rem and that's all for this video. I'll see you in the next one. 13. RemNote Tutorial 6: Beginner's Workflow: In this video, I'll be demonstrating a workflow using RemNote with all the features we've discussed in level 1. It's a basic workflow, but very efficient for someone just starting out with RemNote. I'll start by making a new folder for a class I might be studying for. In this example, I'll be learning about the psychology of consciousness. Since this is a class I will be studying from frequently, I'm also going to go to the document's homepage and pin it to my sidebar for easy access. Now inside this folder, I'm going to be making documents for each lecture.That's Section 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, so on and so forth and I'm also going to give them the names based on the textbook. Let's open up 4.1 and begin. I'll break each lecture further into big topics. To emphasize this fact, I'm going to make them larger, using a header. Then I'll go through the lecture taking notes on the important concepts to know for an upcoming test, making use of different kinds of Rem, like Multi-line and Lists when necessary. Remember, indenting the line will mess the Rem under a parent. I want to break ideas down using the relational thinking of whether or not the Rem is a component or a different type of the parent. This is just one way that I like to take very active notes to make sure that I'm using more brain power to fully understand the concepts and how they relate to one another. But feel free to use any kind of note-taking style that works best for you. That's the general idea of writing notes in the document. I'm just going to skip ahead right now. I'll come back after I've done a few more of these. Now let's move on to using the space repetition features in the workflow. I'm going to return to the folder for Psychology of Consciousness by clicking on it from the sidebar. There are two things I like to do to make my studies more efficient. First, I'd like to color code my lectures. The ones I highlight in red are the high yield or difficult lectures that I want to study more. Yellow highlighters are important, but not quite as important and green lectures are lectures I know very well or lectures that I probably don't need to study very much. Second, I'm going to create a new document at the very top called Study. The purpose of the Study Document is to generate customized study sessions. If I want to study a lecture individually, I can easily do so in the sidebar, but sometimes I'll want to study a group of lectures, like all the red ones or all the yellow ones. You get the idea. I'm also going to change the header of this Study dark and give it an unused highlighter color, like purple, just to make it stand out. Now, all I have to do to study a group of lectures is move the lectures underneath the Study Document, making them children. I can quickly do so with the hotkeys, Alt plus up or down, and then Tab. Now I can study a custom set of lectures. The idea of this workflow is to mimic the way I would take notes in class or from a textbook. It's a linear workflow of information to notes and I can choose to study from any individual lecture or any combination of lectures simply by indenting the document under the Study Document. It provides more flexibility in my studies. Remember, there is no right way or wrong way to use RemNote. This is merely an example of how I would go about using RemNote as a beginner. Once you feel more comfortable, you can add additional features to expand your workflow and improve your study system. I want to finish off this video by showing you how to find help with RemNote. It's a very complex tool and we're always discovering new ways to use it all the time. For questions on features and terminology about RemNote, the best place to start would be the tutorial section found on the bottom left of the sidebar. There are plenty of tutorials to read through and you can learn a lot about the program just from the tutorials. But if your questions weren't answered there, then check out the RemNote help and support page. This is a comprehensive resource that includes the community FAQ. It's a constantly updated document that can further help you diagnose the problem you're looking for. If you're still having trouble or just want to hang out and engage in some awesome discussions with the community, definitely join our discord. That's all for this video guys. Hope that was a useful workflow and if you have other comments or your own workflow, definitely share them in the comments below. Congrats on level 1, I'll see you guys in level 2. 14. RemNote Tutorial 7: Working with Rem: Let's see the ways we can manipulate ramp in a document. You can zoom into a bullet point, which is a great way to free up a busy workspace. There are a couple of ways to do this. First, you can simply click on the bullet point you wish to zoom. Or you can zoom into a revenue placeholders are by using "Control plus K". In contrast, you can hide or read from showing up in a document by tapping, Control plus H. If you want to just hide the parent Rem, you can use Control plus Shift plus H. As you know, tab and shift will move around horizontally. But you can also move around up and down by using alt plus up or down. Another option would be to click and drag a "Bullet Point" to a different location. This method works with multiple bullets at once. So you can move groups have Rem simultaneously by highlighting them all and dragging them to a new spot. Next, you can also move around to a different parent using Control plus M. As a demonstration, I placeholder is here on this idea about asthma. I know I've already created a concept for asthma in the past when I was studying about lung diseases. So I'll type control plus M to select a new parent and then type asthma and hit "Enter". The Rem was moved to its correct place in my notes, to verify it was moved let's open up the asthma document. A quick way to open up Rem or texts as a document is to use "Control plus O" That way you don't have to dig through the sidebar to demonstrate. I'll type control plus O to pull up a search box and then I'll type in asthma and hit "Enter". If I scroll down, there it is, the Rem I just moved. Those are all the basic manipulation features for Rem I want to cover in this video. If you ever get lost or want a quick way to see what options you have for your Rem, you can click the three dots that appear as you hover to the left of any Rem. It will populate a drop-down menu with options for you to choose. I hope that speeds up your workflow and makes working in Rem a lot easier. 15. RemNote Tutorial 8: Linking Tools: Hey, what's up, everyone, welcome back. This is going to be the fourth video in the series in RAM Notes. We'll be discussing the functions of how you can link ideas together so you can better organize your workflow. First let's talk about references. These allow you to create a link to another RAM that you've created in the past. Let's walk through a demonstration here on the screen and we'll be using the same example for all the upcoming linking ideas. I have this RAM on the medicine called beta-blockers here in my document about heart failure. Because beta- blockers are a very important therapy for these patients. However, I later learned that beta- blockers are also useful for prevention of severe panic attacks. Since it's related to both of these topics, I want to link it here as well in panic attacks. To reference, type two open brackets and then the rem name. You can see it'll insert a link into the document. Now if I hover my cursor over the link, I'll see the content for beta- blockers and if I click on it, it'll go to the beta blocker RAM. From here, I can also see all the instances that I've written about beta-blockers. This is a smart way to keep your ideas connected, especially for topics that you don't fully understand because it can help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Next we'll talk about portals. Portals allow you to include or embed information from one document inside of another. You aren't making a link like we showed you with references, you physically include the RAM in your document. I can generate a portal in this document by using the hotkey control I or I can use the search bar on the bottom tool bar and it'll create this blue box around the RAM, which is the portal. Now portals are really cool because any edits that you make in the portal, will be displayed in all the other documents that the portal is a part of. This is super helpful for adding information into a document without actually having to dig for it and also linking ideas together. Next is tagging. This is just like Instagram. You can tag any [inaudible] create by typing two hashtags and selecting the RAM that you desire. We tagged both heart failure and panic attacks with hash tag beta- blocker. After you do so, the tag reference will be displayed to the right side as shown here and you can click on it to reveal all similar items. It also opens up a search box for you to continue digging through your information. If you tag using a RAM you've already created, it will instead bring you to that RAM when you click on the tag. For example, if I already created a RAM for beta- blocker, then every time I'd tag with beta blocker, it will bring me to that beta blocker RAM. You can see how many other RAM are tagged with beta-blocker on the right-hand side or bring up the search box again. The last thing in this video is adding sources to your documents. Whenever you create a new document, you will see a spot to add a source under the title. If you're getting information from a website or textbook, you can add that link or title to the source just to keep organized. If you add the same source to multiple documents, you'll automatically recommend you combine the documents to prevent duplicates, but you don't actually have to combine them. As you can see, if you master all the different ways of linking or RAM together, you can create a very comprehensive and structured study guide, basically a personal Wikipedia for the knowledge that you just learned. On top of that, flashcards are automatically generated from the notes that you've taken. All right, if you miss anything, feel free to go back and watch it again and don't forget we left time stamps in the description. If you have any comments, please leave them below. Thanks for watching. 16. RemNote Tutorial 9: Split Screen: You can multitask in RemNote by toggling a side by side window. This way, you can work in multiple documents at once and transfer ideas back and forth very easily. The second pane, functions exactly the same as the original in terms of searching and formatting and scrolling. So let's look at a couple of ways to open the second pane. You can open the side bar and click on the icon here which will open up a second pane. When working in one document, you can also type Ctrl plus Shift plus o to open up a new rem in a second pane. Finally, you can hold Shift and click on any bullet point to pull that rem into a second pane. Now, let's see some of the unique gestures you can use while working in a second window. You can drag bullet points back and forth between the two windows. You can also copy and paste text and images. However, to prevent duplicate information between your documents, what I like to do is also copy text as a portal into the document using hot keys. Either hold Alt and drag a point across or use the hot key Ctrl plus Shift plus p to copy the portal and you'll see this notification flash at the top of the screen. Then in your second pane, paste it with Ctrl v and it will only copy over that portal. That's all for this video. I'll see you in the next one. 17. RemNote Tutorial 10 : Linking Ideas: This video will be a demo on, how we use the linking tools in RemNote, like references, tags, portals. Because throughout your studies, you're bound to come across concepts that are related to one another. We want to show you how you can make connections to streamline your workflow. Here are all the tools that I'll be covering in this tutorial. We've already gone over the basics on how you can create these. But if you need to brush up on that, then check out our RemNote tutorial number four for a refresher. In this video, I'm going to be applying these tools, showing you how I would use them in my study sessions. The hope is that you'll get some ideas on how you would want to use them in your own studies. Portals are one of the main reasons why we love RemNote. We think of RemNote as a database that contains all of our knowledge on any topic. Since your knowledge base is constantly growing and you're constantly learning, you need an easy way to add new knowledge. Traditionally, if I were taking notes on a pen and paper, I would store my notes in a notebook. Every time I learn something new and I wanted to add that piece of knowledge to a very specific spot in my notes, I'd have to flip through all the pages until I found the right spot. That waste a lot of time. If I were taking digital notes, it'll be a lot easier because I can use the search function to jump straight to a word without having to sift through all those pages of notes. But even when I use the search function or control find, you still have to sift through all the instances of that search term. So there are still inefficiencies when you do this. But with portals, this now becomes incredibly efficient. Let me show you an example. For me, I like to make portals of diseases because we're constantly learning new things and every time I learn something new, I can add it to that disease portal. Let's say I'm making a portal on COVID-19. Every time I learn something new about that disease, I can simply bring in the entire portal, and just like that, now it's on my page with command i. So I can add my new piece of knowledge right here to the portal and it'll automatically update the COVID-19 portal everywhere in my entire database with this new piece of knowledge. Think of it as, adding new information to a cloud. Portals can save you a lot of time when you're adding new information to your existing notes. But imagine if you had a whole page full of new info that you wanted to add. Take this for example. These are all new things that I've learned today at work, and I want to be able to put these individual pieces of knowledge into the right place in my notes. This first concept would best fit in my cardiology chapter, specifically in the heart failures section under drug therapy. This one would go with the neurology section. This one will go in the dermatology section. Think about how long it would take me to dig through all my folders and documents to find the right spot for each of these new concepts. It can get tedious, but with portals, I can just bring in any topic right here in the document and then I can easily just drag and drop all my new concepts. Portals are incredibly useful in creating an efficient workflow. We'll give you more examples of how we use portals in our practicing phase. Definitely be on the look out for that. Let's talk about references. These are useful in helping you link two ideas without breaking your train of thought. Because the nice thing about references is that you can just hover your cursor over it and it will show you briefly what the reference is about. The standard way to use them would be to reference your sources. If I'm writing a paper or article, I can use it to make my work cited page very easily. But another way that you can use references is in your flashcards. For example, this multiple on rem that I made is asking, what are some diseases that are commonly seen in a patient with type 1 diabetes? I've listed a few here. Well, you can actually make all the answers in this multiple line rem a reference. So that way you have a quick and easy way to remind yourself, what these answers were individually. Let's talk about tags. One way that we like to use them is to mark all the cards that we find difficult. When you're trying to edit the flashcards that you repeatedly get wrong, you can tag them so that they're all grouped together in one rem. For example, I keep getting the answer to this flashcard wrong. So I'm going to tag this as hard. Now, if I want to see all the cards that I think are difficult, and I want to review only those that I can go directly to the hard tag and just review those cards. Another way that tags can be used is to place a rem flashcard under multiple parents. Let's say that I'm studying lung cancer. I choose this example because, it can be confusing to categorizes disease. Should I put it in the lung diseases chapter or should I put it in the cancer chapter? Because I'll be tested on lung cancer on both my pulmonology and my oncology exams. What I'll do is, I'll tag lung cancer with both tags. That way, when I'm studying for my pulmonology tests, the flashcards for lung cancer will show up in my queue, and later on when I'm studying for my oncology test, the flashcards will also show up in my queue. Those are some of the ways that we like to use the linking tools in RemNote. We'll be doing more in depth walk-throughs later in the course during the processing and practicing phases. We'll see you there. 18. RemNote Tutorial 11: Study Workflow: All right everyone. Here comes another workflow video, including features from level 1 and 2. We are back in psychology class and in addition to learning about how the human mind works, we've also learned more about RamNode. As you can see on the screen, I've studied from a couple more chapters from the textbook, Chapters 1 and 2, and partway of 3. I've placed all the chapters in a folder called Psychology 101. First thing I want to do now that I've created a more concrete location for my class, is also add a source so that if I choose to review this class again in the future, I'll remember where to find all the native information. To do this, I'm just going to copy the URL from my textbook and place it under the source section, and there it is. Thank you Open Stacks for this free textbook and education. Let's continue with section 3.3, parts of the nervous system. We'll use all the new things we've learned in RamNode for level two. To quickly access the correct section without using my mouse, I'll use Control plus O to open up 3.3, parts of the nervous system. This works because I outlined the chapter earlier and just wrote down the headers as documents. I'm going to start from the top of the lecture. The first concept I see in the nervous system is broken down into two divisions. The central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is further broken down into brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system connects the central to the rest of the body. If you recall earlier in level 2, I discussed references and how it's a good idea to start thinking about concepts in relation to one another, because it helps connect the dots between your ideas, and it also helps RamNodes spaced repetition algorithm, group your flashcards in a more effective way. I want to get into the habit of paying attention to related concepts, like I see here for these two systems. Let's make a reference from the peripheral to central nervous system in the definition using open brackets, choosing the right one and then hitting enter. If I hover my cursor over it, the reference has now been made. A feature I really like to use is full-page preview on hover, that way I can see everything about a concept, rather than just its content. Let's turn this on in settings on the toolbar. Scrolling down to experimental and checking the box. Go back to the document. Now when I hover my cursor over the reference, it displays all the descendants. I'm just going to go ahead and continue learning from the rest of this lecture. Remembering to break ideas down to their most basic parts and thinking about concepts and how they are related to one another. I'll use references to concepts wherever I can. I'm not trying to be a perfectionist with my notes because, I know that when studying flashcards later, I can always add cards to edit later, and it can also easily maneuver between my ram using all the manipulation features we discussed earlier in level 2. Now I finish this lecture and you can see things organized in a way I understand. The next thing I'm going to do is make backlinks using text references for concepts I've learned that might have been mentioned in the past. This way, I'm further reinforcing newly learned information and making connections between everything I might have learned so far. Let's do this with central nervous system again. I'll move my pointer to this rem and use Control plus K to zoom in on that rem. There's going to be a box on the screen where you can find texts references. Another way to do this for rem that are not made into references, you can also click on the three dots at the top right of the screen and choose find texts references to this document. It will create a search portal. Inside the search portal, I can see a few instances of where I've mentioned central nervous system and link them to the reference, so all of my ideas are connected. Now I'm going to talk about studying from these lectures. If you recall the study document from level 1, we use tab and Shift tab and Alt up or down to move documents around in order to study a custom set of lectures. But over time, you might have a ton of lectures, and this method might not be feasible for creating a custom session. Here is an alternative and a more efficient way of doing so. As you recall, I highlight and color-code all my lectures depending on difficulty. I use red to indicate difficult or high yield lectures, yellow for semi difficult, and green for the easy lectures. What you can actually do is filter a document using Control plus F. My study doc is in purple, so I'll put purple. Then, let's say I wanted to study only the hard lectures or red, so I'll choose red as well. Now all the lectures I need are on the screen, so what I can do now is just move these lectures into the study doc. Another way to do this would be to use Control plus M to individually move a lecture to the study doc. The caveat here is that you will have to move your lectures back to their original chapter if you want to maintain the organization of your notes. But I find that this is not super important because you'll likely want to study the difficult lectures often, and if you keep them in the study doc, you can take full advantage of the space repetition software. My goal by the end of this kind of workflow is to move all the lectures that I really want to learn for the long-term into the study doc to practice. That concludes this workflow video. Hopefully you picked up some helpful tips, congrats on level 2, and I'll see you guys in level 3. 19. The Processing Phase: Now we're in step two, which is processing. The idea of processing is to learn something usually for the first time and then process what you've just learned into RemNote. We'll be using RemNote a lot in this section so if you haven't already, make sure to go through our tutorials to familiarize yourself with this program. Just a reminder, here is where we are in the big picture. We've planned out what reading we need to do, and now we're going to read and it's a lot easier said than done. The processing step can be very challenging if you don't know what you're doing, so we're going to teach you how to build a road-map in order to efficiently absorb your reading material, and yes, I do mean constructing a physical road-map. We'll be doing this inside of RemNote. Imagine that you need to learn this entire science textbook for your exam and you're learning it for the first time. It's a lot of information and this stuff is new to you. It's unexplored territory. What you're going to do is map out all the important concepts that you need to know for your exam because think about it when you're embarking on a journey, it's always a good idea to map it out first. Where you're going, get the address, get the best routes, locations, do all of this before you start driving. The first step in Processing is to map out what you're about to read so that once you start reading, you'll know what to look for. You don't want to just read aimlessly. Figure out which destinations to include in your road-map, like restaurants, schools, grandma's house. But these are actually all the concepts that you need to learn in your science text book, like cell biology or DNA or osmosis for example. The best way to map things out is by writing questions. If you form questions, then you'll have a goal for your reading, which is to find the answers to those questions, or in our analogy, finding the path to your destinations. We'll be showing you exactly how to form those questions in the next chapters walk-through, but for now, just know that you'll be mapping it out and writing questions into RemNote. Moving on, once you have questions written out, the second step is to look for the answers to those questions. You've already mapped out where it is, now it's time to explore and actually get there. You'll read your book or watch your lecture, and you'll go through it and as you're doing it, you're going to try to find the answers to your questions and when you find an answer to a question, make sure that you actually understand it. Why is that the right answer? The final step of processing after you've mapped out your questions, after you've found your answers, you're going to go ahead and fill in your road-map. Now is the time to record what you've learned to create an accurate map. It's so important that you understand why these answers are the right answers because when you go to write them down into RemNote, we want you to write it down in your own words because remember we said that the processing step is all about doing it in such a way that you will understand it. That is a systematic approach that we take to Processing. One last thing I want to mention is that you don't need to be a perfectionist. Just get through the reading as fast as you can understand it and if you miss some details along the way, it's okay because once you've reached the end, it's a lot easier to go back and fill in the parts of the road-map that you missed now that you've already paved your first road through. As you'll see later on the practicing phase it's all about filling in the gaps and reinforcing what you've learned the first time through. In the next two sections, we'll be showing you walk through examples of how exactly we use RemNote to process information. We'll see you there. 20. (Processing) How to Approach Lectures: Okay guys, in this video we'll be covering how to process from a PowerPoint or video lecture. If you're a student at university, it's almost guaranteed that you'll have classes with this teaching style. So having the right approach is super important. The processing steps from before haven't changed. You'll be mapping out the questions, finding the answers and then adding those answers into rem-note in your own words. The way the information is being presented is different. So we need a slightly different approach. First let's talk about lectures. The problem with big lectures is that you have one teacher teaching the subject in a way that they understand it to a group of 300 students, who all learn at different speeds and in different styles. So if you have the option of attending it in-person lecture or listening to a recording. I definitely recommend the latter, because you can pause, rewind, fast forward to suit your own learning pace and style. Before watching the lecture, you're going to want to map out as much of the road-map as possible. Usually near the beginning of the lecture or on the class website, professors will post learning objectives or goals. These are the important concepts to note. Those are the designations from our driving analogy and if you have time, it's a good idea to skim through the rest of the PowerPoint to familiarize yourself with what's to come. When you start listening to lecture, we have two general rules about when to write something down. The first reason would be if your teacher says something's important or is going to be on the test. The second reason would be if your teacher says something's not important or is not going to be on the test. Why is that? It's because PowerPoint's are created by your teachers. It's already a condensed version of the most important things you need to know. If you're frantically writing down word for word what they're saying, it's pretty likely that you'll be writing down information that's already in your slides. This is especially true if your teacher's just reading off the slides. Your efforts are better spent trying to process and understand what your teacher is saying, to grasp the big picture. You're actively listening and processing the information to find the answers to the questions you mapped out. This isn't a strict rule. There are some instances where writing notes would be a good idea. For instance, if your teacher explains a graph or chart or a confusing slide, you might want to quickly summarize it so that you don't have to decipher it again in the future. After the lecture, you can rephrase all the answers into your own words, into rem-note. For videos, you probably won't have any lecture slides look at beforehand. In this case, do the best you can in mapping it out. I would use the same objectives or goals from your teacher or use your syllabus. We just want you to have some direction while watching the video, so that you're not writing down every little detail if it isn't high yield for an exam. For videos, you can also pause at any time to add your ideas into rem-note, but again, do it in your own words. All right. Those are the important points to know about studying from a lecture or from a video. In the next video, we'll walk you through the process step-by-step. See you there. 21. (Processing) PowerPoint Walkthrough: All right guys. In this video, I'm going to show you a step-by-step walk-through example of how I use RemNote to process a PowerPoint lecture. All right. So I have a lecture opened up in Notability here. I like to use this app because I can annotate directly on top of the slides. But it's not a requirement for method of mastery. You can really use any app or even PowerPoint, because remember that the end result will be putting all the information into RemNote, which is a road map. So this is a lecture from my medical school about substance abuse and it was actually a mandatory lecture for me. So I did attend, although reluctantly. But first things first, before we even start the lecture, we want to map out questions and review the PowerPoint. So let's look at the PowerPoint here. So this lecture was given by Dr. Albert Arias, who did a pretty good job scrolling down disclosures, disclosures. So this slider here was really important because it states the goals of the lecture. So I'll pull the remnant up as a multitask and start to write each of these objectives on separate lines because I want each one to be it's own parent term. So let's go ahead and do that right here. So the first goal says define categories of problematic alcohol use. So my parent term here is going to be problematic alcohol use. Okay, then the second goal says, discuss screening and diagnosis of at risk drinking and alcohol use disorders. So it looks like I'm going to need to know the screening and the diagnosis for both at-risk drinking and alcohol use disorders. So in RemNote, I'm going to make the parent term at risk drinking and then I'm also going to make another one that says alcohol use disorders. Okay. Since I need to know the screening and diagnosis for both of these terms, I'm going to go ahead and indent the line here. Make a child for both of them that says screening and another one that says diagnosis. All right. So as you can see, I'm just mapping everything out, making questions. The third one says discuss communication techniques. So I'm going to write communication techniques. Cool. Okay. I do that for all the goals, of course but let's move on. Now I have a rough idea of what to expect from the lecture and what to look for while listening. So let's go through the lecture like I did in class. The first slide here has some terminology. Awesome. That's the first thing from the goals and during a lecture, my professor is specifically stated that these three definitions, were going to be very important, which is why I highlighted them. The next slide was more about the definition of a standard drink and on the side, I wrote in something that the professor mentioned was important. When gathering history about alcohol consumption, you need to be as specific as possible with amounts. For example, if a man says that he drinks two beers a night, I can't assume that these are two standard beers or 12 ounces as shown in the picture because beers come in all different sizes and different alcohol content. So we want an accurate estimate of alcohol consumption to appropriately assess for health risks. All right. Moving on. So this slide here was pretty much summarized by this orange box right here. This is a concept that was highlighted multiple times in the lecture. So I definitely going to want to know this. Now, I'm at alcohol use disorders. This slide has useful information to answer goal number two on my road map. All right. Moving on to the next slide. Okay. So this is actually a really good slide to talk about because it has a table in it. So the professor actually summarized the importance of the slide, which I wrote down in red. So I wouldn't have to read the table again and try to figure out what it was saying. So I wrote, screening numbers are backed by science that's why we ask. I can interpret that, obviously, because I wrote it but basically what it means is that the current screening recommendations were generated because of scientific data that shows that when people consume alcohol above the recommendation, their risk of developing an alcohol use disorder increases substantially. I'm going to stop there, but that's how I would systematically go through the whole lecture, listening and summarizing all the key points to the answers in the road map questions we wrote earlier. So now I'm going to use Step 3 of the processing phase and add those answers into RemNote. Whenever possible, remember, we want to do so in our own words. Rephrase ideas in a way that you can understand. Plagiarism is not chill. When we put any information into RemNote, we're automatically making flashcards. So making good flashcards is really important and it comes with practice. The idea is to write focused, simple flashcards that resemble how your tests will look like, because we want to study exactly how we will be tested. So let's just start from the beginning of the lecture and I'll walk you through that. So let's go back to the terminology slide above. I only need to add the highlighted definitions into RemNote because those are the only ones that my teacher specifically said would be testable for me. I think they fit with goal number 1 as categories of problematic alcohol use. So under the parent term in RemNote, I'll write moderate drinking, at risk drinking and alcohol use disorders. Interesting. So as you can see in my road map, I just rewrote two terms that I already included from goal number two. So I'm actually just going to move these two terms under problematic alcohol use and then get rid of the ones that I just wrote it in because now I can see that all of these definitions would be components of problematic alcohol use, which would be the overarching parent term. Nice. So I was able to make a quick connection between the learning goals and organize my notes in a better way and it also looks like all the definitions are going to be broken down further into men and women. So I'll do the same in RemNote. I'll write definition and then indent again men, enter women. We want to avoid long lists or complex answers. They're just really difficult to remember and frustrating to practice with. The more focused and clear, the better. So looking at the moderate drinking definition, I see men two drinks per day, women, one drink per day, and if greater than 65, one drink per day. So I'm going to try my best to rewrite that in my own words. Although it's pretty concise already, I'll just try anyways. So write men, two colons, two drinks per day or one drink if over 65 and then for women, space bar to go down one, two colons, one drink per day regardless of age. That's how I would go through the entire lecture, adding information into RemNote. So let's quickly study these flashcards so you can see what they look like. So we'll do that by pressing the three dashes on the right and studying Rem in this document. So as you can see, even though I didn't specifically read out the question, what is the definition of moderate drinking in men? I know that this is what the flashcard is asking me, due to the breadcrumbs and the context that comes with the parent chain system. All right guys. So I hope that helps in getting you started processing lectures. Just remember that it's going to take a lot of practice, but as you can see, once you input everything into RemNote, you're never really going to have to visit these PowerPoints ever again because all the information will be in RemNote and they'll be in flashcard form for you to study. 22. (Processing) Textbook Walkthrough: Guys, in this video, I'm going to show you another step-by-step walk-through example of how I use RemNote to process from a review book. The goal is to show you our workflow and our thought process as we go through it together. Hopefully it'll give you an idea of how you would want to personalize your own workflow. I'll have the three steps of processing up here somewhere so that we can keep referring back to them as we do this walkthrough. These are mapping questions, reading to find the answers, and then filling in your road map. For this example, I'll be using my Internal Medicine Boards Review book open in this window and then I'll have RemNote open in this window. I like to start by looking at the Table of Contents to see how the author has organized the information chapter by chapter. What you want to do is always try to break down the organization into smaller and smaller categories. Let me show you what I mean. In this review book, I'm learning about all the diseases of the human body and I see that the author has broken down all these sections into different organ systems of the human body. We have Cardiovascular Medicine, which is a section about heart diseases. We have Dermatology, skin diseases. Gastroenterology, diseases of your gut and your digestive tract, and so on. I'm going to go ahead and write this down into RemNote. Internal Medicine Boards. Cardiology, Dermatology, Gastroenterology. I will go down and just write all the chapters of this entire book. Just write them down. So already, we've broken down the entire human body into individual organ systems or smaller subcategories. Now you can see that we can keep going and continue breaking down each organ system into individual diseases within those systems. For example, let's look at the Oncology section, which is the study of cancers and you can see there's a chapter for Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer, Gastric, Colon. I'm going to go ahead and write all these down as well into RemNote. Can we break down each individual chapter even more? Sure, let's go to the Breast Cancer chapter and now you see that they start breaking down the information into different components of each cancer. For Breast Cancer, we have Screening, Testing, Treatment, Follow-Up. When you study any type of cancer, you want to know all these things about that cancer. You want to know how to screen for it, diagnose it, treat it. I'm going to go ahead and write down all these components of Breast Cancer into RemNote. You see it again here in Lung Cancer, you got Screening, Diagnosis, Testing, Treatment, it's all the same stuff. I'm going to go ahead and write these down as well, and for Gastric Cancer, and for Colon Cancer. It seems like these bold headings are the smallest level of organization that we can reach for now and by the way, this book does a great job in just mapping the layout in the Table of Contents. For you guys, I'd recommend doing the same thing. Start in the Table of Contents, start mapping there, and then go into each chapter and continue breaking it down section by section and heading by heading. We're still mapping here and a big part of mapping is writing questions. Or if you take a look, these are all questions. Look. How do you screen for Breast Cancer? That's a question. How do you treat Breast Cancer? How do you follow-up for Breast Cancer? Each of these smallest headings can be questions. Questions that you'll be reading to find the answers to. Now we're on step two. We're reading to look for answers to our questions. Let's read about how to screen for Breast Cancer. Recommends biennial mammography for asymptomatic average risk women age 50-74. Basically what they're saying is, you use a mammography tests to screen, and you screen women who are age 50-74, and you screen every 2 years, biennial. Looks like the answer to my question actually has multiple parts to it. But if you're reading an actual textbook it may take a lot more reading until you find answers to your questions, so just keep at it. Now the final step is to fill in your road map that you've created on RemNote. Fill the answers that you found for your questions in your own words, in a way that you will understand it. When I have complicated answers with multiple parts like we have here, I like to break down the question into multiple questions as well. I'm going to make a new line and write a more specific question. At what age do you screen? Two colons, and the answer is age 50-74. How often do you screen? Two colons, answer, every 2 years. What test do you use to screen? Two colons, mammography. I'm going to go down, and read and fill all these answers in. For all the screening, and testing, and diagnosis for each of these cancers. For Lung Cancer, at what age do you screen? 55-80. Who do you screen? Anyone who has smoked for 30 years and quit within the last 15 years. What test do you screen with? Low Dose CT Scan of the chest. Notice that I didn't copy and paste exact verbatim from the book. Instead, I put it in my own words. Some of you might ask, why can't I just download your RemNote and study from that instead of wasting my time making my own. Well, you can. But then you'll be missing out on the processing which I think is the most crucial part to you understanding the information. When you go to study your flashcards in the practicing phase, the front of the card will look like this. They'll ask you, at what age do you screen? You're wondering screen for what. If you trace back up to the parent, it says lung cancer. At what age do you screen for lung cancer? Remember you mapped all of this out in the first step, but RemNote gives you the question and it gives you the context or the big picture of where this flashcard fits in your overall road map. But really, take a look at how RemNote flashcards are organized because it's going to help you rephrase your course material. The phrasing of your RemNote flashcards is important and there is such a thing as a good and a bad flashcard. Because you want to write your flashcards as questions and answers. You want to keep them as simple as possible and you want to try to write the questions as close to how you'll be asked on your actual exam. That's why I wrote my questions as what test you screen with, because my test is going to ask me in that way. Notice how I didn't phrase it as, what is a Low Dose CT Scan? Answer. A test used to screen for Lung Cancer. Because that's not how my test is going to ask me. You can use a CT Scan for many other things. It all comes down to how well you understand your course material. That's why we always recommend that you make your own flashcards instead of downloading them online or from someone else. In the end, you want to think of this entire processing step as using RemNote to make a road map and kind of like a Wikipedia of all the information that you need to know for your test. As you study and learn new things, you can go back and add to your notes. At that time, you can use RemNote search function to quickly find any piece of info that you want which means that you only have to read through your textbook once and never have to go through it again. I hope all this made sense. But if it didn't definitely go back and re-watch this video as many times as you need to. See you in the next one. 23. The Practicing Phase: So step three is practice. In this chapter, we want to emphasize two reasons why you want to be practicing every single day. First, you want to make sure that you're actually retaining the information that you've learned from the processing phase. This is why you must study your Remnote flashcards every day. The second reason is to identify any gaps and weaknesses and your knowledge. This is why you must do practice questions every day. As a reminder, here is where we are in the big picture. We've just walk you through how to process your lectures into Remnote. So in this chapter, I'm going to show you how to approach the practicing phase using Remnote and practice questions. I want to continue using a road-map analogy from before to further explain the importance of why we're using a Remnote flashcards in the practicing phase. So think of it like navigating to a new job for the first time in a city that you've never been to before. You'll probably have to use GPS as you struggle through new territory and streets that you've never been to before. That's what we were doing in the processing phase. Now you could just keep using your GPS every day to get you to work, but you won't really be learning how to get there. You're relying on having a GPS to get you to your destination. This would be equivalent to practicing with passive learning method, like rereading your notes or your PowerPoint lectures. It's not active learning. You weren't forcing your brain to work in remembering which freeway entrances to take or whether or not you had a turn right or left on main street, you're blindly following directions, hoping that eventually it'll stick, but imagine instead that after your first time using GPS to get to work, you didn't use it again. Sure you might get lost the first time and have to refer back to the GPS to get you on track but you learn from your mistakes and maybe by next week you're able to do it with no problem. This would be like using active recall to study, flashcards. You weren't cheating by giving yourself that GPS to show you the answer, but you're forcing your brain to use more effort to retrieve the answer. This struggle, using more brain power is really important to fully understanding your studies forwards and backwards, because each concept is a different destination that you need to route yourself to. Now if you decide to take a two-week vacation before driving again, you might have a hard time remembering how to get where you need to go. So you have to practice often enough or else you'll forget. So really aim to do your flashcards every single day to prevent this from happening. Because, come test day, you won't be allowed to use your GPS to answer the questions. You'll have to do it from memory. So as you can see, practicing your flashcards every single day is crucial. Now let's talk about doing practice questions and old exams. So doing practice questions are like trying to navigate to work with multiple roadblocks, street closures, and construction. You might read a question and get thrown off by another answer, which is the roadblock. The only way for you to get the right answer is if you're able to reroute yourself. So it requires you to fully understand and navigate the entire road-map that you've created in the processing phase. You have to be able to confidently reach each destination. This is why it's so important for your practice questions to also have explanations. They are practically useless without them, because knowing why an answer is incorrect is just as valuable as knowing why the right answer is correct. Even if you've got the right answer to the question, without knowing the explanation, it's possible that you got it right for the wrong reasons. We don't want to be reinforcing any incorrect information into our brains. Hopefully we hammered in that analogy enough for you guys. There's just one final tip about practicing that we have. For old exams and practice tests, try to make them feel as close to the real tests as possible. This means if it's going to be an open book tests, then practice with an open book. If it's a timed test, practice with a timer. If your test is early in the morning, then you should plan to practice early in the morning. Practice exactly how it will happen on the day of the test. It's important to remember that you want to be spending most of your time in this phase. This is how you'll be assessing your strengths and your weaknesses while also making sure you haven't forgotten important information along the way. So the more you practice, the better your results will be. So in the next few chapters, we'll be showing you some more examples that how we use Remnote to practice. 24. (Practicing) Test Taking Strategies: Good test-taking skills can really take you a long way, especially for multiple choice tests. So, In this video, we're going to share some tips on how to approach multiple choice questions. All right. So Most testing, whether it's standardized testing or in the classroom will contain some form of multiple choice questions and if you've been using the processing step from the method to mastery, you should be well prepared for any tests that comes up. Okay. Let's talk about our tips and strategies for how you can maximize your score on test day. So early on in elementary and high school, you will likely see a lot of simple identification type questions and these just require you to choose and recognize the right answer. This is called a one-step question, a first-order question. But as you get to higher education levels, you'll start to see much more difficult multiple choice questions that require you to go through multiple steps of thinking in order to get to the right answer, and sometimes these questions will come after a passage or a vignette and the questions will be based on what you read. So let's talk about how to approach these harder multiple-choice questions and we're going to go step-by-step. First, read the question stem. It's usually the portion of the question right before the answer choices and if you see a negative word like not or none, highlight underline, or make some note of that word so you remember it. One of the worst feelings is knowing everything there is to know about a question and getting it wrong for that silly mistake. Okay. Next, it's helpful sometimes to quickly glance at the answers to help orient you towards a particular topic or chapter that you might be dealing with and this tip is pretty helpful for vignettes or a longer passages because we want to avoid having to reread a passage or reread a vignette and looking at the answer choices first might help you narrow down your focus while you're reading it for the first time towards the right answer. Okay? So look at the answers really quickly, just a couple seconds and then go back and read the vignette and highlight things in the question that you find are important, such as numbers, figures, symptoms, anything that you might need to reference quickly because like before, we want to avoid rereading any passages, and once you've finished reading the question and you know what it's asking you to do, you should have an idea of what the answer is already going to be and hopefully it's there and if the answer is not there or you just don't know the answer based on the question, here's what you're going to do. Treat each answer choice as its own true or false question, so go through each answer choice individually and if you know why the answer choice is wrong or you know some part of it that's wrong then cross it off, and even if you did know the answer, it's still a good idea to go through this process because you might find an answer that's better or you might find in all of the above, and if the question is written very well or it's written very poorly in it's very vague, it's possible that more than one answer might seem correct and this is the predicament that many test takers come into but remember, there's always going to be just one best answer. So something to keep in mind is that even if the answer choice is a true statement or it seems like it could be right, if it's not a 100 percent true or it doesn't answer the question, then it can't be the right answer. So hopefully the right answer is there. So just select it and move on. Now you also don't want to be spending too much time per question. A lot of standardized exams are timed. So one general rule that we'd like to go by is one minute per question and if you can't come to an answer in a minute, mark the question if it's possible put a guess down and move on, Okay? Always at least put a guess down because for the most part, the standardized exams will not have penalties for wrong answers. So effectively, putting no answer at all and putting the wrong answer are the same. So at least put a guess down, you might get a right, increase your chances, maximize that score but at least you'll have marked the question so if you finish the exam following that one minute per question rule, and you have time, you can come back and visit the questions that took a little more thought and hash it out for little longer. All right. So next, let's talk about guessing, because no matter how hard you study, there's probably just going to be like one or two questions that were just so far out there and you'll have no idea what the answer is. For these questions, you're going to go through the same steps as before looking at each answer choice individually as a true-false question and if you can eliminate just one of these answers, your odds are ready a lot better, and from there, we would say, just go with your gut. Whichever answer pops out to you upon a first glance, just choose that one and move on. What happens is subconsciously, our brains are actually making connections between the questions and the answers, but we might not just be aware of it at the time. So that's why going with your gut is probably the best idea in this case and only as a last resort, should you ever use letter of the day that is, choosing C for all the answers that you're guessing for the tests, or B or A. So if you're going to be using letter of the day, you might have heard the saying, choose C If you don't know the answer. Well, a recent study came out and said that statistically B might be more common of an answer. So I would choose B instead, but my point here is that the tests are randomized and a lot of standardized testing now have random test generators which scramble the answer choices and scramble the order for every student. So effectively, this approach is not going to work. Here's another myth that we want to clarify. You might have also heard that the longest answer is usually the right answer and this is definitely not true and I wouldn't let that swear you towards the wrong answer if you saw that on a standardized test. So now I want to talk a little bit about changing your answer. So as we mentioned before, going with your gut is most likely going to be your best bet. Okay? Unless you misread the question completely the first-time or unless you got new information that you didn't have before, don't change your answer, and some of you might be thinking, I'm a pretty good second guesser and that's okay if you are, because some people are, but we want to find out if you are a good second guessing or before you take the test. So here's a good way to do that. While you're doing practice questions for the exam for a few days, I want you to make a little note next to every question that you change your answer for and then when you're reviewing your answers, make a table that consists of these three things. The number of questions that you changed from correct to incorrect, the number of questions you change from incorrect to correct and the number that you change some incorrect to incorrect, and tally up the results. This is going to show you how good of a second guess or you are. Some queue bank apps or programs like you world for us Emily will do these statistics for you and provide you with these results, but if you aren't using an app like this, you have to do it yourself. Most likely, the results from this experiment will indicate that second guessing is not as effective. You've spent hours preparing and learning the information for the exam, and chances are, you know the answer, okay? Even if you don't think you do at first and this is because like I mentioned earlier, you are subconsciously making associations with the correct answer from reading the context clues or recognizing patterns, okay? Try not to overthink a question. We've all been there and I I've been there, right? You select answer choice C, but then you look at choice D and you're like wait, is this test maker trying to fool me? D is right too, So I will be dumb not to pick D, right? And then you change your answer. Well, guess what? In a battle between sort of correct and incorrect answers, like we mentioned, correct is always correct. So to recap, chances are, unless you have a very specific professor who has no did try and mislead his students or her students. The test questions will be single best answer, and we don't recommend you switch your answer. There are usually no tricks in standardized testing so believe in your ability, trust your brain and trust what you know, okay? You've accomplished a lot. All right. So now I'm going to cover how to practice with multiple choice questions. When it comes to practicing with practice questions at home, make sure you're very thorough with your approach. Hopefully you'll have the answers and explanations for the practice questions that you're doing. This is super important. If you don't have the answers and explanations, then you could just be wasting your time because you're learning the wrong answers or you're learning the wrong reasons for why you got an answer right. Okay? So in practicing, I want you to approach every question just as we reviewed in earlier slides. That is, you're going to be making more flashcards. When you go over the answers, I want you to be able to read out why the answer was right and if you didn't know this, I would put it on a flashcard, but I also want you to be able to write out why every single wrong answer was wrong. If there was a piece of information that you didn't know from going over the answers, also put that on a flashcard and add it to your deck. Sometimes a question can help you make connections between answers, or it can help solidify information that you learned about earlier in the processing phase and this is why doing practice questions is so important. You are applying the knowledge that you learn and you're seeing how it can be tested. Some students think that because they did a whole practice test, that they wasted those questions because now they know the answer to them, but remember, that only works for simple recognition, multiple-choice questions. If you're at a higher level and taking the more difficult multiple choice questions, then you shouldn't just be focusing on the right answer, you should also be focusing on every other answer and why they're wrong and better yet, put that into a flashcard so that you can practice retrieving that reasoning from your brain. This is why you are able to reuse the same practice questions more than once during practice and this is actually why we encourage you to read your question more than once. So, to sum up how you're going to be practicing doing the questions, follow the process that we talked about earlier in this module. Okay? You're going to read the question, highlighting any important information, go through each answer choice individually, be able to answer why each one is true or false regarding the question and then make it into a flashcard. It's always a good idea to have a systematic approach and the best way to improve your test-taking skills is to practice as much as you can. So Join us in the next few lessons where we'll practice together. 25. (Practicing) Approaching a Multiple Choice Question: Now we're going to put what we've just learned into practice. Let's tackle this multiple choice question together and I'm going to share my thought process with you as we go along. Now, let's go into some examples and we'll walk you through the process. We're going to look at a question from the US [inaudible] and this is a free practice test they posted for all medical students preparing for the Step 1. We're going to go in order and we're going to follow all the steps that I mentioned earlier in this video. Step 1, we're going to read the question stem first, which is the last sentence of the vignette and it says, "Which of the following drugs was most likely prescribed for this patient?" Immediately, I know that I'm going to be looking for a drug. The next step was to highlight or underline any negative words, and in this vignette, there aren't any negative words. But I do see a most likely. I'm going to go ahead and highlight that. Because that's going to point to the type of answer that I'm looking for. The next step was to quickly glance at all the answer choices just so I have an idea of what I'm looking for. Glancing at the answer choices, Acarbose, Glyburide, Metformin, I know that this patient will be having some diabetes. Just from the question stem and the answer choices, I've already narrowed down what I'm going to be looking for. Now, I'm going to start reading from the top and I'm going to be highlighting any more keywords, buzzwords or references that I might need to answer the question. Let's go from the top. A 52 year old woman begins pharmacotherapy after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It seems like my thought process just from reading the question stem and the answers was correct. Continuing on four weeks later, her hepatic glucose output is decreased. I'm going to go ahead and highlight that because that could be important, and target tissue glucose uptake and utilization are increased. That's also going to be important right there. At this point, I already know the answer to this question. But when you're doing practice questions, you're going to want to go through every answer choice individually and cross off or be able to explain why all the other answer choices are incorrect. I'm going to go from the top and I'll start with Acarbose. I know that Acarbose is an Alpha-glucosidase inhibitor, which means that it prevents the breakdown of sugars in the GI. That's probably not going to have an effect on hepatic glucose output and it's not going to have an effect on the sensitization of glucose at the cells. I'm going to go ahead and cross that one off. Next we have is glyburide, which I know is a sulfonylurea, and this drug class, I know is going to bind to ATP sensitive potassium channels and keep the insulin receptors depolarized. This is going to cause the pancreatic cells to secrete more insulin. I don't see anything about insulin in the question stem, so I can cross this one off too. The next one is metformin, and I believe that this is the correct answer choice, so I'm going to go ahead and skip that one. Looking at D and E, we have nateglinide and repaglinide and these drugs come from the same drug class, which means that they both have the same mechanism of action and they both do the same thing. I know that just based off that fact that these both have to be wrong because you can't have two right answers. I'm going to go ahead and cross both those off as well, select my correct answer, and let's see if I got it right. Show answer and I did. Great. Metformin is a biguanide and it increases glucose sensitization at cells and it decreases to gluconeogenesis, so that meets both of the criteria of the highlights that it did in the passage. Hence, this is the correct answer. The point of me doing this question was trying to explain diabetes drugs to you. It was to show you that in order to answer a question properly in practicing, you have to know why each answer choice is incorrect, and why the correct one is correct. Effectively, there are five different flashcards you could've made for this card because five different answer choices had to be explained. Those are the exact steps that I want you to use when you prepare while doing practice questions at home. That's basically how we would approach it. Remember that you want to spend the majority of your time practicing and get as much repetition as possible. That's why in the next chapters, we're going to do more examples together. I'll see you there. 26. (Practicing) Question Walkthrough: This video is going to be a little different as we're going to walk you through step-by-step how we navigate RemNote while doing practice questions. The goal is to show you our workflow and our thought process, as we go through it together and hopefully give you an idea about how you'd want to use it to personalize your own workflow. If you recall, the practicing phase is broken down into two practice, doing your flashcards for long-term retention, and doing review questions to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. I have a shelf exam coming up next week for pediatrics. Why don't I show you how I'm using RemNote to prepare? I'll first show you how I input new information from studying practice questions into my existing database and then I'll show you how I study flashcards and make adjustments and edits during the process. I've gathered a lot of practice questions to prepare for the shelf exam which corresponds to part 1 of method of mastery, the planning phase. Remember that when doing practice problems, you want your resources to include full explanations so you can really understand the concepts. Let's just go through it the same way I went the last question in the last lesson. My approach to a practice question is to first read the question stem, and then I'll highlight or underline any negative words if there are any. I've just pulled up or random question here from my queue bank and I've opened it in Google Docs. Let's get started. The question stem is the last sentence before the answer choices. Let's read that. Which complication is the patient at greatest risk for? There is no negative words. I don't have the highlight anything there. Then I'll read the answer choices. A chorioretinitis, B, cataracts C, notch teeth, and D, sensory neural hearing loss. Just from reading the question stem and the answer choices, I can tell that this question is going to be asking about congenital infections in newborns. I'll have to decide which symptoms in the vignette correspond to that clinical picture. Now, I'll read the rest of the question and highlight any important information I think I'll need. A two month old girl comes in for her initial visit. The family just moved to the area and the patient has not been seen by a provider since birth. Routine prenatal serology was normal. She developed jaundice at age two, with bilirubin 13. I think that's going to be important, so I'll go ahead and highlight jaundice. Her sister also has jaundice. They have a dog and a cat at home. That might be important. I'm going to highlight cat. Weight and head circumference are below tenth percentile, cardiac auscultation shows one out of six for systolic ejection murmur. It seems like it will be important. Ultrasound on the head reveals periventricular calcifications. That's going to be very important. I think that is giving me the answer right there. Physical exam reveals patterns splenomegaly. The correct answer here is going to be D, sensorineural hearing loss. I got that from the last two sentences of the vignette talking about periventricular calcifications, which I know is a very specific finding for congenital CMV infections. I also know that congenital CMV infections can lead to hearing loss in children so that's why the answer was D. But even though I got this question right, I still want to investigate all the other answer choices just to make sure I know why they are also incorrect. Let's just scroll down and see what the explanation say. I'll start with A, congenital toxoplasmosis can be acquired through maternal exposure to cat feces, which is why I highlighted the word cat. Classic presentation is obstructive hydrocephalus, parenchymal calcifications in Korea retinitis. I actually didn't know that toxoplasmosis also presented with brain calcifications, but these are intracranial, not periventricular. That's a distinction between the two CMV and toxoplasmosis, which is pretty important for me to know. I would consider this to be a gap in my knowledge. Since I don't want to forget this fact, because it can help me distinguish between these two diseases, I'm going to want to put it into RemNote. I'm just going to pull up a multi-task here and pull up RemNote on the side. I'll open up a document in the pediatrics folder by clicking this button right here. All the information for my pediatrics exam will be in this folder. Back during the processing phase, I know I've already created a ramp or toxoplasmosis, but I don't think it included this specific information about intracranial calcifications. I want to add it. To do that, I'll open up a portal in this document by using control or command plus I, or I can type it in the search box at the bottom there. I'm going to type in toxoplasmosis. It looks like I already made a Rem for this concept, but it's part of another Rem called congenital infection presentation. Press "Enter" and then I can see that that document is included here. I was right, I didn't include intracranial calcifications before, so now I'm going to add it in and intracranial calcifications. I'm actually going to also highlight intracranial calcifications in a different color because I want to remember that that's going to be a distinguishing feature between this and CMV. When I study the flashcard again, I'll see this highlighted and I'll know to pay extra attention to that. I also want to expand congenital infection presentation because I want to see all the other diseases I have written in there. I'm just going to click on it from the breadcrumbs and then to expand them all at once, I'm just going to use the hotkey control or command shift down and it'll open up all the descendants of that parent. It looks like I have common symptoms, CMV specific, toxoplasmosis specific, rubella. I'm also going to highlight the periventricular calcifications in CMV because, like I said, I want that to be something I remember as a distinguishing feature between these two diseases. I quickly added new information to update my flashcard, so the Rem will appear in both documents. But when I study it, it will still have the bread crumbs from the original folder saying infectious disease. That's how I wanted to organize that information in the first place. If I wanted to remove the portal from this document for any reason, I could do so by using the hotkey control or command plus H. But since I want this Rem to show up while I'm studying for my pediatrics exam, I'll leave it in the document. That's something that I really like about the RemNote workflow. I can work in any document I want and easily move information around using portals. I don't have to dig through folders to find info, I can just bring them in and remove them at will. Let's get back to the practice question. That entire process was because of one incorrect answer choice and I still have others to go through too. For answer choice B, I'm pretty sure I understand the reasoning behind that, but for answer choice C notched teeth, I'm not so sure about. I'm not sure I actually learned what disease notched teeth would come from. I've discovered another gap in my knowledge, notched teeth or Hutchinson teeth, or a late finding of untreated congenital syphilis. Newborns also present with hepatosplenomegaly, jaundice, rhinitis, rash, and abnormal development of long bones. I don't think I have a Rem for syphilis. I'm going to make a new multiline Rem for syphilis, and I'm going to add it under the same parent term and all of these other conditions because it's also a congenital infection presentation. I'm going to press "Enter". Type in syphilis, type in three colons to make the multi-room card and I'm going to add in all of those clinical findings that I just learned about from reading the explanation. That is abnormal long bones, rash, rhinitis, notched teeth. Let's just say, for example, say that I wanted to move syphilis to a different category event infectious disease, because I think it fits in somewhere better. I'll use musculoskeletal because it involves bones. I can do this in RemNote by moving my placeholder to syphilis and then you type in hotkey command m or control m and it allows you to choose a new parent for that Rem. I want to type in musculoskeletal, press "Enter" and now you can see that syphilis was moved to a different parent in the same document and there you go. RemNote move the information to it's correct place in my mind without disrupting my workflow at all. I'm also going to tag this Rem using hashtag speed run, which is my tag for new or difficult information that I haven't mastered yet. That way, first thing tomorrow morning, when I start to study, I can type in hashtag speed run and do a speedy run of all the information I don't know well, expanding all the Rem I need and then studying only the Rem with that tag. All of that happened because of one practice question. After doing that process for all your practice questions, you can see how you'll have a pretty complete Wikipedia of information to study for your exam. Hopefully, you were able to pick up on some useful tips and tricks that could be helpful to incorporate in your own workflow. Thanks for watching. 27. (Practicing) Flashcards Walkthrough: In this video, I'll be practicing some of my daily flashcards on RemNote. It's a routine task, but I want to share my thought process with you so that you can borrow ideas for your own workflow. Now, I'm going to move on to the next part of practicing which is doing flashcards. This part is a lot more self-explanatory, but let's just go through a few cards and I can show you my thought process and how to go about editing cards on the fly or making any changes you need to. I'm just going to study some more flashcards from my pediatrics folder, and I'll do that by opening up the left toolbar here, scrolling to pediatrics and then pressing the practice rem in this folder. So papilledema, headache vomit, ataxia. This is going to be obstructive hydrocephalus. The treatment for tuberculosis would be the four drug regimen which I remembered by the mnemonic RIPE, which is rifampin, isoniazid, [inaudible] and then ethambutol. Whenever I can, I like to add mnemonics into my flashcards. It just makes remembering things a lot easier. This is a good card because CHARGE is already a mnemonic and I made it a list in rem so that I can remember it in order. For one, it would be coloboma which is some eye malformation. Number 2, H would be heart defects, 3 is going to be atresia of the choanae, which is the opening behind the nasal pharynx, R would be retardation of growth and development, and then the G would be genitourinary malformation, genitourinary anomalies. Pretty much the same thing, and E was going to be eye or ear, it has to be ear abnormalities. This cards can be useful if you're trying to remember mnemonics. Here's another flashcard that I'll probably want to edit. This is a pretty bad flashcard because it's not specific enough. As you can see all my other flashcards were very specific asking for treatment or presentation or certain labs, however, this flash card it says beta thalassemia. I'm not really sure if I remember what I wrote on the other side. Did it talk about the genetics about it? Did it talk about the risk factors? Did it talk about presentation? It's going to be a gamble to know what's going to be on the other side. Loss of hemoglobin, Beta gene common in Greek descent, presents it six months because fetal hemoglobin drops. I got pretty lazy making this card. Let's go ahead and edit this flash card now so that when I revisit it in the future, I'll have a better idea of what it's asking for. We'll do that by pressing E to bring up the edit box. I'm going to make a new rem called pathophysiology or what's causing disease in the body. For this one I'm going to write loss of hemoglobin Beta gene and then I have Greek descent. I'm going to make another rem that says, which patient population is this disease common in? The answer for this will be Greek descent. I'm going to make one more flashcard that says age of onset, and that looks like six months due to fetal hemoglobin, and now that I've made these three new rem, I can just go ahead up to the top here where I wanted to edit it, delete all these, and now I've made three new flashcards for this one concept. However, they're much more focused. When I see these flashcards, I'll know exactly what to answer and I won't be getting confuse or missing any information and then done editing. The last thing I want to mention about doing flashcards is that you can tag flashcards while you're studying them as well. Say for example, this flashcard on the screen, niacin and b3 deficiency which I know is going to be pellagra. Say you had a hard time remembering this card. I can just press edit and then add a tag to it right on the spot for example, the speedrun again, and then move on, and then that card will show up later in my speedrun deck for me to study. That was a demonstration of how I go through the entire practicing phase between practice questions and flashcards, filling in all those gaps in knowledge and making sure I remember everything I learned before. We want to practice as much as possible. Doing practice questions is ideal, because you're practicing exactly like how you'll be tested. But don't underestimate your space repetition flashcards, there's less friction in starting a quick flashcard study session, especially when you're out and about. Make sure you're staying consistent on a daily basis. 28. Bonus: Essay Tests: This is one of the bonus videos and we're going to be showing you how to practice for an essay test. Remember, you want to practice just like how it's going to happen on the test. Instead of doing practice questions, we need to practice writing essays. Before we go any further, there are a few things that we need to acknowledge. Mike and I are not expert writers. We don't have the credentials to teach you how to become a better writer. There are a lot of things that go into good writing, like vocabulary and writing style. We're not going to touch on any of that stuff. What we do know is the more reading you do, the more you will come across different writing styles, and over time you're going to naturally want to imitate the style of your favorite writers. Our advice here is to just do a lot of leisure reading and diversify which authors you read. But back to us, this is not a writing course and this is a study course. We're trying to prepare you for an essay test. So regardless of how good your writing is, you can ace any essay tests if you studied and prepared for it the right way, you don't have to be a good and captivating writer. Final point before we start talking about how to prepare for the essay tests. In general, there are two different types of essay tests that you might come across, one is called the analysis essay tests, and the other is the elaborate essay test. The analysis type is when the test provides you with a reading passage and you have to read it and make sense of it, and then write an essay based on your interpretations of the passage. We're not going to focus on this type very much, they mostly show up on standardized tests. The best way to prepare for these is just read tons and tons of examples of well-written essays. What we are going to discuss in this section is the elaborate essay test, which is much more common in the classroom. These are tests where the teacher expects you to have learned the topics you talked about in class, prior to coming to the test. On test day, you'll be asked to write essays on the topics you learned in class. We're going to share a step-by-step process on how you should be preparing for the elaborate essay test. First, find essay questions from older versions of the test you're about to take. If you're taking a standardized test, and this shouldn't be too difficult. If you're taking a class in college, this is when it would be helpful to either ask the teacher directly, or ask upperclassmen who have taken the class already. If the teacher won't give you a direct answer about what's going to be on the test, at least ask them what you should be focusing on when preparing. Step 2, now that you have sample essay questions, you can start getting to work preparing. The way to do this is to know all there is to know about the topic. This means know all the key terms, know all the vocabulary, and the definition for that topic. For example, if it's going to be for a history class then knowing all the events and dates of significance is going to be very helpful. Likewise, if you take an a government class or an economics class, it might be good to know when laws and policies were implemented that changed the way things were done. You're also going to want to know if there are a lot of contradicting ideas in the topics that you're learning. I'll use a philosophy class for this example. In a philosophy class a very common essay question might be, compare and contrast the two different ideas of these two philosophers. You'll have to be able to answer independently about each theorem. Why was it made? What's the impact it has on society, and who is it targeting? But in all of these essay tests, you might see a common theme. Do you see it? You got to know why a topic is important and why it matters. The why it matters is really important. This will help you answer basically every question. When you're processing phase here, hopefully you have designed flashcards that capture the why of all the topics. The final step is to make a structured outline all the questions you can find. When you're practicing at home for an essay test, you have to plan out the essays before the test day. We're going to do this by making a blueprint, we're going to put that blueprint on a flashcard. This way, you won't even matter what question you're asked on test day. All you have to do is plug information into this blueprint and you'll have a perfectly fitted formed answer. Let's hop into an example so I can show you guys exactly what I mean by all this. Here is our simple essay blueprint. It's an easy layout that you can apply to pretty much any essay tests, more or less. You write an introduction and then multiple body paragraphs and a conclusion. We just wrote in three body paragraphs, but really it can be as many as you need. When you prepare for an essay test, the most important thing, is to have as many examples up your sleeve as you possibly can. You need to be an example machine. The flashcards will really help you achieve this level of preparedness. But here, let me go through an example with you. I'm going to use US history as an example. A cool trick and organizing your knowledge for an essay test, is to use the table of contents in your textbook. Here I have a table of contents of a US History book. As I'm scrolling through, you can see that every chapter is divided into sections. Well, the author did that for a reason. It's almost as if each section is an example that you can use for your essay. Here let's look at Chapter 9. Looks like it's about industrial transformation. If you get any question about industrial transformation, you can use any of these sections as examples. It doesn't really matter what the question is, if you know all of these examples by heart, then you should be able to answer any question. Let's pretend that the essay test is asking you to explain what factors contributed to the industrial transformation. Let's go back to our blueprint and we're going to start with the introduction. It says answer the question using how ever many specific examples you want. We're going to try three. I would say the industrial transformation was influenced by many factors, such as the market revolution, the transportation revolution, and the mercantile system. Those are just three sections that are listed here in the table of contents, but you see those three examples will each be one body paragraph. In paragraph one, I'll write about the market revolution, in paragraph two, I'll write about transportation, and then in paragraph three, I'll write about mercantile system. Now onto the body paragraphs, and as you can see, we stress the five W's, the who, what, when, where, and most importantly is the WHY. These can all be writing points for your body paragraph. Let's apply this to the market revolution. For example, who influence the market revolution? What was the market revolution? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Then most importantly, why does this matter to the essay question? The market revolution was all about the use of factories, and steam power manufacturing and production lines. All of these key terms that I mentioned, each of these can be a flashcard. You need to know about factories and factory workers during this time when you study, and you probably have come across manufacturing and production lines. But the point is, if you studied well, then you'll have these examples at the ready, and you can pull them from your brain to answer any question that they thought you on this subject. Now we get to the WHY. As we mentioned, the market revolution contributed to the industrial transformation because it used factories and production lines. But why is this important? Because factories and production lines lowered the cost and making goods, and this in turn will strengthen the country's economy or something like that. But as you can see, I'm trying to provide the why did the key terms and why does this example relate to the question? Let's try another body paragraph. Let's try the transportation revolution. What are some details about the transportation revolution that you would be expected to know from class. Well, I'd assume you would be learning about railroads, steamboats, canals. You would have a flashcard with the question, what did the transportation revolution consist of? What? On the back, you could write railroads, steamboats and canals, or something like that. Once you have learned that well, you have as a flashcard, you studied it well, and now it's a tool for you to use as an example for any essay question they throw you on this topic. For the conclusion, some people just restate the answer to the question that they wrote in the introduction. You can definitely get away with that. It's also a good idea to reiterate the why, from your body paragraphs. That's how I would approach writing an essay using specific examples. These examples will have been your flashcards so that you made while you were processing the information during your processing phase. Hopefully you were able to pick up on some useful tips and tricks that can be helpful to incorporate in your own workflow. Thanks for watching. 29. Bonus: Problem Based Tests: This is another bonus video about how to prepare for a problem-based test. Generally in these types of subjects, like physics, chemistry or math, calculations and problem-solving are much more heavily tested than reading and writing because these classes have less reading to do, the processing period will also be shorter. That means it's much more important to practice. In this section, we like to go by the saying, monkey see, monkey do. That's really the best strategy here, because it really works. Now you want to watch someone to work through a problem and follow their thought process. Your first exposure to any kind of problem will most likely be from your teacher, which makes sense. Your teacher is going to work through a problem on the whiteboard or on the projector or wherever, and just really pay attention to their thought process and if you're having some difficulty understanding it from the way your teacher's teaching it to you, it's also really helpful to have someone else explain exact same concept again, because you want to have a different perspective on how to approach the problem. We're actually very lucky these days because oftentimes you don't even have to go to class in order to learn the information. You know, when I was in college, I had several professors whose lecture styles I just could not understand and it's not because they didn't know the material well, it's just that their way of teaching just wasn't sticking for me. As a student, this was really frustrating, because you are told that your professors are the main source of information and the main source of learning. Well, nowadays there are so many online sources that can help you learn the information. YouTube is a great place to start. I used to go on YouTube all the time and just look up how to do certain math problems, how to do certain chemistry problems, physics problems, other sources like Khan Academy, which are free great tools because they teach you step-by-step and how to do a lot of problems. If the teacher isn't doing a good job explaining it to you, there are other sources for you to get that information, but really we want to be watching and learning, monkey see, monkey do because you want to understand the thought process of how they got from point a to point b. Once you've seen the process done several times and follow it alone and you understand it, it's time to try it on your own. You can start easy by simply re-doing the problems you went over in class with your own book and your notes closed. If you're in high school, it's likely that you've been assigned homework and I know how much everybody hates homework, but homework is such a great tool in these kinds of classes because it reinforces the need to keep practicing these problems over and over again. Few tips though, if you get stuck, allow yourself to struggle for a little bit, because remember, the more brain power you are using, the more it's going to stick. However, this comes with a caveat. Don't waste too much time. You don't want to be spending hours struggling on a single problem that you don't understand, just move on and then when you have time, bring that problem to your teacher, or find a TA or find another video or something that can help you learn how to do that specific problem and then the process starts all over again with a new concept, monkey see, monkey do. You just keep at it until you can independently do all the practice problems on your own with the examples closed. That all sounds pretty intuitive, right? But the way that we're going to implement this with our method is that we're also going to make flashcards. These flashcards are going to be a little bit different though. On one side, you're going to write the problem you're trying to solve, and on the other side, instead of solving the problem, you're going to write out your thought process. Write out the steps that it took to solve the problem. The flashcards that you'll be making here are going to be a little bit more basic. You don't want a whole bunch of information and you don't want to clutter the card up. You can refer back to Mike's how to make good and bad flashcards video if you want a little more information about that. I think it's also helpful if you're taking an exam like the MCAT or the USMLE, where there are problem based questions mixed out through the exam where you need to know equations. It might be good to make equations on flashcards just so you remember what to plug in. Overall, you're not going to be making too many flashcards for these kinds of tests. Most of the work is going to be practicing. There really isn't any secret tips or hacks in order to ace these tests, you just have to do problem after problem, practice over and over until you can do the problems on your own. Hopefully you're able to pick up on some useful tips and tricks that can be helpful to incorporate in your own workflow. Thanks for watching.