Struggling: Anatomy & Physiology

[ibree]

Evening, It is my second year in college majoring in Nursing. I am currently attending an community college. I've took Anatomy & Physiology but it was an introduction class. The class helped me prepare for A&P 1 but I had to drop A&P 1 because I'm still struggling with studying. My study skills are not great. My degree plan is being held back because of me struggling with A&P. Now I'm going to retake A&P 1 and I want to have my study skills 100%. So this is my plan, over the summer, I will read the chapters & create flash cards of the terms. I will look over the terms and the concept of A&P 1. I think this will help, right? How many hours would you guys recommend me to study each day? I'm thinking of studying 4 hours a day. I have a part time job so it's kind of difficult. I'm dyslexic so it's hard for me to learn but if I prepare myself a head of time I will have no problem. What are you guys thoughts? I need all the help I can get? Advice is good too!

[KellyVT]

For me drawing diagrams and flow charts helped a lot with understanding A&P, just writing down terms and memorizing wasn't enough to really fix the information in my brain. I also used a variety of materials (instructor provided study guides/homework, questions in back of book, additional study guide from publisher, A&P coloring book, alternate A&P text from library, khan academy videos, etc.) to help myself look at the material in different ways - particularly areas that didn't make much sense to me. I find that the more context I have for a term or idea the easier it is for me to retain the information, so I'd find ways to link one topic or idea to another that I understood well. If I still didn't get something I'd ask classmates about their understanding or go to my instructor's office hours, or open-lab study time on campus. I ended up spending 20-30 hours a week outside of class on understanding the material which was hard to juggle with work, but it was worth it when I scored 100% on my final exam and walked out of the class with a 4.0.

This! There is bound to be 1 way you understand and remember a concept. For cross bridge cycling and the NMJ (and end plate potentials, action potentials etc) it was videos, for memorizing muscle names it was the coloring book for examples. I used a combo of the interactive website, 2 textbooks, the coloring book, the Cliff notes book and various websites. My final is next week, so I don't know my final grade, but I've gotten 99- 100% on every exam/quiz. If I start getting bored studying one way, I switch to another. It makes it so much more tolerable. I used to live and die by note cards, but this way is working much better for me.