Evidence-Based Studying Part 4 - The Study Tip That Beat a 3D App
I went down a rabbit hole on the research behind how we study, and built the best of it into a 5-step system. This post covers one piece. Watch the full breakdown in this video.
-Simon
Your stick figures are better than you think.
Reading anatomy over and over is comfortable, and it’s a poor use of your study time. The evidence suggests there’s a better option: generative drawing. This means studying a region for 5 minutes, closing the book, drawing it from memory, then checking what you missed and redrawing it. In a 3-arm trial, drawing from memory beat both clay modelling and a 3D anatomy app, and the two comparison arms didn’t move at all. Same 5 minutes.
Most of us assume the fancier tool does more of the work. So what happens to your $50 app when it goes head to head with a pen? Nothing good, and the reason is that scrolling a rendered model is recognition while drawing from a blank page is recall. Starting with your next anatomy block, close the book before you draw rather than copying while you look.
In a study on this topic published in 2023, Beach and colleagues randomized 62 first-year medical students into 3 arms: drawing from memory, building the structure out of clay, or using a 3D anatomy app on a screen. They compared pre-test and post-test performance across the 3 conditions. They found only the drawing group improved significantly, by around 11%, while clay and the app produced no change. Mathon and colleagues found the same direction in a 2021 randomized trial of 80 medical students, where teaching through drawing raised scores by 12% at one month with an effect size of 0.62.
THE 3-PEN SYSTEM
• First pen: the attempt from memory
• Second pen: the redo
• Red pen: whatever the check caught
Those red marks are your 5-minute warm-up the following morning. Yesterday’s misses are the cheapest marks available to you, and they’re already identified, already prioritised, already sitting on the page. Resist making any of it look good. A stick-figure ventricle outperformed the beautiful textbook cutaway in the dual-coding research, so 30 seconds per drawing is the target and prettiness is procrastination wearing a lab coat.
Exam tip: Draw the structures where a lesion changes your management rather than the ones that are simply complicated, since brachial plexus branches and the biliary tree earn their ink and the carpal bones mostly don’t. Sketch the region, then write beside it what breaks if each part fails. Or, for the carpal bones, write beside it what type of cast you’d use if that bone breaks. That functional link is the kind of reasoning a SAMP (Select-Answer Management Problem) can ask for.
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References
Beach et al. (2023). n=62 Y1 medical students, randomized 3 arms (draw-from-memory versus clay modeling versus 3D app): only the drawing group improved significantly (approximately 11% pre-to-post); clay and 3D-app control did not. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.2313
Mathon et al. (2021). Randomized trial, n=80 Y3 medical students: teaching-through-drawing versus standard, scores increased by 12% at 1 month (p=.009, d=0.62). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-020-07484-3
Butcher (2006). 108 undergraduates (heart/circulation): text plus diagram versus text-only, better mental models, more inferences, fewer errors (all p<.05). The simpler the diagram, the better the student score. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.98.1.182
Image Source: Photo by Amanda Lawrence on Unsplash
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