Medical & Nursing Flashcards

The Best Study App for Medical Students

Of all the possible subjects you could study, the field of medicine involves the most "memorization" by far.  Succeeding in medical or nursing school, and passing your certification exams, requires you to mentally internalize thousands of difficult concepts into your long-term memory.

You can't afford to waste time by using purely static, long-form study guides, videos, and reading materials that will simply go in one ear and out the other.  You deserve a web and mobile app that breaks down all your medical questions and answers in a way that doubles your learning speed and the duration of your memory retention.

For more advice to help you study medicine, check out our in-depth guides for nursing school and beyond!

Online Medical Flashcards

Brainscape proudly offers you the world's largest repository of high-quality med school flash cards (or "note cards" if you prefer that term :).  These study materials are created by top students and professors from Harvard Medical School, MIT, and several other top universities, as well as by prominent publishers in several cases such as MCAT flashcards and USMLE flashcards.

But these are not your grandfather's flashcards.  When you study in Brainscape's web or mobile app, our system asks you to rate your confidence on a scale of 1-5, in the same way you might manually classify paper index cards into "piles" depending on how hard they are.

Brainscape then uses your self-rated confidence score to determine exactly when to show that flashcard again.  This spaced repetition algorithm guarantees that you will learn faster and remember for longer.

Medical Terminology and Images

The flashcards you'll find in this marketplace have been created using a variety of formats.  The most common types of cards are for medical vocabulary.  Not only are there great vocab cards within the various subjects in the list above, but we even have several well-curated sets consisting purely of Medical Terminology practice, neatly divided into chunkable sub-decks.

In addition, for a lot of the subjects in this marketplace, you'll even find thousands of medical images that supplement the material in the cards themselves.  Whether they are diagrams of important biological systems, or actual x-ray or MRI scans from real patients, you will find a treasure trove of useful imagery that will help all that new knowledge stick.

Free Nursing Flashcards

If you're studying to become a nurse, rather than a doctor, you'll still find thousands of courses' worth of great flashcards among the categories listed above.  In fact, a lot of these courses are actually the same introductory course -- whether you are in medical or nursing school -- so the cards can be largely interchangeable.  And they're all free to try!

If you ever want to know more information about who created the note cards in a particular subject, simply click on their profile, and see if they're in a program or school similar to yours.

Spaced Repetition -- Learn Faster!

As described above, the greatest benefit of using Brainscape is our unique implementation of spaced repetition -- which we call Confidence-Based Repetition (CBR).  CBR optimizes your learning by allocating your study time as efficiently as possible.

Each time you see a flashcard in Brainscape, the system asks you how well you knew the answer, on a scale of 1-5.  Based on your confidence rating, Brainscape's study algorithm determines how soon to show you the card again, with low-confidence items being repeated more frequently until you have reported a higher rating.

For example, let's say you saw a diagram of the heart, and you were asked to label the left ventricle.  If you were totally clueless of the answer, you might rate yourself a "1" the first time you saw it.  Because of that rating, Brainscape would show you that flashcard again in like five or ten flashcards from now.  And upon that next viewing, you could either upgrade your rating to a 2 or a 3 (thereby pushing the next repetition a bit further into the future), or you could keep the card as a 1 to ensure that you're drilling it into your head before proceeding.

You're essentially curating your personal learning stream, on a constant, ongoing basis.  This system makes use of three major mental processes that help us build our memory: Active Recall, Metacognition, and Spaced Repetition.

With Active Recall, you are practicing recalling a piece of information from scratch rather than simply "recognizing" it on a series of multiple choices.  This added retrieval effort strengthens your neuron connections and prepares you to be able to apply the knowledge in the real world.

The process of Metacognition is then invoked as you reflect upon how well you knew the concept, in order to rate your confidence.  Cognitive science shows that the simple act of assessing your own knowledge strength is enough to deepen the memory trace itself.

Finally, Spaced Repetition solidifies that knowledge by repeating the concept in just the right amount of time before you would have otherwise forgotten it.  Research indicates that the more effort you have to expend to remember something, the greater the hippocampus will work to build new long-term memory neuron connections in your prefrontal cortex.

Thousands of academic studies have proven the effectiveness of Active Recall, Metacognition, and Spaced Repetition before, but nobody has applied these concepts more effectively than Brainscape has.  Rise to your challenge with Brainscape today!