How do you study for nursing courses?

Nursing Students General Students

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It really depends on your study techniques that you've learned throughout school, how your nursing instructors are, how much material is between each test...etc...Every school is SO different when it comes to everything that laying down a specific was to study is extremely difficult. The most important thing though...don't give up the study techniques you've use for non-nursing courses! You can't change your entire way of thinking just for nursing school (although it IS completely different than any other program out there!)

My best advice is see what the teachers say, In our program we only have about 5 or 6 teachers total, so we deal with them more than once throughout the program. Each teacher is COMPLETELY different when it comes to how they teach, what they want you to know for tests, and how they get questions for the tests. Learning how each teacher works, and how to study for each teacher and each test is really difficult but it does help to understand how they work. (our class for example: we use the same textbook for all of our med-surg classes and for most of our teachers, even though its the same textbook, each teacher wanted us to focus on certain things more than the other, and each teacher demanded a different amount of time focusing on the reading and the other resources we had available to us, if we would study the same way no matter the teacher, we are likely to fail :|)

The best advice I can honestly think of, is to read the material, pay attention to what they want you to know, and really understand the concepts, the disease processes and treatment/nursing interventions for everything they want you to know. For instance, when you go over something such as Diabetes Mellitus (or type 2) you need to understand how the disease works and how it progresses, what parts of the body are affected, what organs are affected and how are they affected. What does it cause symptom wise, and how can you diagnose it. Then you need to understand what kind of treatment is available and how that treatment works to combat the disease and its symptoms. It's a lot of hard work, and I like to compare it to medical school, to me, nursing school is a 2 year medical school that pushes all the information it can into you that any general doctor learns over 4 years.

When you are looking at the concepts you are learning about, understand the big picture, how everything is affected...that's critical thinking, being able to use the knowledge you have about a subject, such as Diabetes, and applying it to a question that you may barely understand. Understanding the overall disease and how to manage it, as well as the priorities (ABC's, ABCDE's, and the nursing process) is what nursing school is all about...

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A lot of creative studying and brute force time spent. There is so much to memorize, learn, and then apply in practice. I literally am sitting here right now thinking, what am I even going to do with my evening? My Spring Break is next week and I just have no idea what to do when I don't plan my entire night around studying or a 9 hour work shift. That's the reality of being a nursing major xD.

First things first, I go over my class notes and any powerpoints/handouts given to me and match them up with the textbook to make sure I understand what I'm reading. Once I know I do understand it, I make note cards. Even if it's information that doesn't really do well in format on notecards, I write it out, because the repetition and repeating it out loud as I write each card helps me. Then I go through the note cards. Anything I haven't learned by that point, I outline on notebook paper, or search for a YouTube video on it, or something, anything to make it stick. I need to 100% feel like I know it, because if I do that, I'll hopefully make at least an 80% on the test :unsure:. That's how it's worked out for me so far.

All in all, I probably spend about 10 hours studying for each chapter, and a lot more if it's drug-related pharmacology stuff.

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Depends where you are in your program.

Im in an ASN program, first semester was all about assessment and prioritizing.

So I would always think, "What will kill my patient first?" (ABC's)

Is this question assessing my knowledge and interpretation of maslow's hierarchy?

Now i'm in med surg I, basically doing the same thing, while learning different diseases.

My instructor for medsurg is very concerned about ''what will you do / need to know as a bedside nurse?"

As a result, this translates to: Learn the disease, learn it's presentation (clinically what will you see? HR up, BP down, MAP down, urine output 15ml per hour? patient cyanotic [late sign] etc)

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Few things I have learned in the past couple years:

- focus on lecture notes and powerpoints; try not to get so bogged down by the textbook which often contains more detail than you

are responsible for!

- learn to use your study time efficiently and try to get out of the habit of procrastination; remove distractions, take breaks!

- don't study "passively"; as opposed to skimming through the textbook absorbing a fraction of the material (however this might work

for some people), use flash cards and try to answer study questions in the textbook - find ways to actively think about the

material

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