Healthcare CrownAcademy Home

Study skills

Active recall for nursing students

Test yourself instead of rereading: a simple method to remember lectures for longer.

How to do it

  1. Close your notes and write down everything you remember about one topic.
  2. Open your notes and mark what you missed or got wrong.
  3. Turn each gap into a short question you can answer in one line.
  4. Answer those questions again tomorrow, without looking first.

Why it works

Rereading feels productive because the page looks familiar. Trying to remember is harder, and that effort is what makes memory stick. Use your own lecture slides as the source, so what you practise matches what you are taught.

Read closely, magnify, highlight and turn what matters into recall cards.
Inside the app. Read closely, magnify, highlight and turn what matters into recall cards.

A worked example: heart failure

Say your lecture covered heart failure. Close the slides and give yourself three minutes to write everything you remember: causes, signs, the difference between left- and right-sided failure, and what you would monitor. Then open the slides and compare.

Perhaps you remembered breathlessness and swollen ankles but mixed up which side causes which. That gap becomes a card: “Left-sided heart failure: where does fluid build up, and what do you hear?” Answer: in the lungs; breathlessness, often worse lying flat, and crackles on listening. A second card covers right-sided failure: fluid builds up in the body, so you see swollen ankles and a raised jugular venous pressure.

Tomorrow, answer those two cards before you look at anything else. If you get them right, move them to a later day. If not, keep them close.

Mistakes that waste the effort

A simple weekly routine

  1. After each lecture (10 minutes): a brain dump on one topic, then make cards for the gaps.
  2. Every day (10–15 minutes): answer the cards that are due before starting anything new.
  3. Once a week (30 minutes): a mixed set of practice questions across several topics, then turn every mistake into a card.

Common questions

Is active recall the same as flashcards?

Flashcards are one way to do it. Writing from memory, explaining a topic to a friend, or answering practice questions all count, as long as you try to remember before you look.

How long should a session be?

Short sessions work well: 10 to 25 minutes of recall, then a break. Regular short sessions beat one long one.

Does it work for clinical skills too?

For the knowledge behind them, yes: steps, safety checks and reasons. Hands-on skills still need supervised practice.

Research behind this guide