Table 3.

Themes identified from interviews with medical students regarding how their study habits changed during an undergraduate medical school course, 2020.

Theme	Representative quotes
Increased time spent using active learning techniques	‘I wanna prioritize my time and be as efficient as possible… It’s really easy to be studying all the time and be kind of drowning in information and not really feeling like you’re even processing it… my main study resource has been using Anki.… I think [the course] was helpful to reinforce how active recall is the most efficient and helpful way to study.’ ‘I definitely did not review PowerPoints in their entirety, there simply wasn’t enough time for that. I focused more on quizzing myself on the material through the learning objectives after each lecture. And then, wherever I felt weak, going back to the PowerPoint and reviewing that component. [I used] Anki cards religiously. I honestly think those helped a lot. And, then I would look at the [lecture outlines] that were provided for us and basically do those at the end of the week as a final review.’
Devoted more time to studying rather than creating study resources	‘[I am] transitioning from making all of my own study resources to kind of trying to be a little more time efficient, and make less of my own study resources so I can spend more of my time just actively studying. So, now [after that course], I try to use many more pre-made resources, because I think that it’s a more effective use of my time.’ ‘I think the biggest thing that changed in [the course] was that I did not have to make my own Anki cards. So, it became a lot less about, I’d say like 80% of my time with Anki was spent on making cards and 20% was spent reviewing them, and now it’s, you know, 100% reviewing them, so I think I got to just focus on drilling a lot of the concepts a lot more.’
Reviewed content multiple times throughout the course rather than cramming before the examination	‘We know that you should study things from the beginning of the semester or the class, you know, keep it up, but it’s really hard to prioritize that. So just having the Anki decks pre-made was incredible. Just using them at all, helps me realize how important it is to be reviewing stuff from the beginning of the module. And I’m just not sure that I would have figured that out on my own, frankly. And even though I would have told you that I know I should be studying stuff from week one, like it’s just hard to prioritize that. And so now … I learned how to make good cards from seeing her [Anki card] deck, but I also learned that I need to be reviewing. And so, for the last two classes, I’ve set up my decks to be like week one, week two, week three, so that I can make sure that every night, I’m coming back to week one and week two, even though we’re already in week three.’ ‘I did not do a full review [before the examination] because it was just like you’re constantly reviewing.’
Increased use of study techniques that synthesize course content	‘[The lecture outlines] did make me think about the content differently. [They] helped me look at a lecture and say, ‘Can I make a table out of this information? Is there something here that I should be comparing to something else we’ve learned?’ So it’s kind of a meta element to the handouts, even though I thought for [the course they] didn’t make a huge difference, [they] did just kinda teach me what kind of things to think about.’ ‘I use tables. [A professor from the course], he used to have a lot of tables [in the lecture outlines]. So, I still make tables whenever I want to compare and contrast multiple diseases. Like, for the last module, I had to learn seven types of arthritis. So, as you use the tables, the way he had them, it would have etiology, symptoms, something like that. So, I used that method.’