prepare to study for the NCLEX
How To Study for the NCLEX
A reminder, if you’re going to be joining us in the 8 week day by day study guide for the NCLEX you’ll want to make sure you take advantage of our Boot camp. You can get it for half off this month – $74.50.
Here is the link for that –
http://www.nclexreviewonline.com/nclex-boot-camp-nclex-review-course/
Today we’re going to talk some about how to study. Thursday we’ll talk about how you learn, when to study and how to get rid of test anxiety.
Quality is Better than Quantity.
It is more important to have a quality study session every day than it is to study 10 hours every day. I tutored a student earlier this year, she was a single mom who worked two jobs and had four kids (young ranging in age from 6 to 15). When she came to me she was very concerned because did have ten hours to study every day. For some reason she had gotten it into her head that she needed to study that much. I explained to her that quantity didn’t matter. Studying for a few intense hours a day is better than haphazardly studying all day on. I worked when I was in nursing school, the longest I studied was five or six hours on Saturday when I was with a group of friends and we studied flash cards the whole Saturday afternoon.
Setup a place where you can focus. The key is it has to be free from distractions. You can not study for five minutes, check your messages for five minutes and then study again. Remove your cell phone from the room. Study for an hour or so, take a five or ten minute break, then study for an hour again. I found if I studied early in the morning I had much fewer distractions because I was the only one awake. Find the best time for you to study and then make it a point to study the same time ever day. Our body gets into a rhythm and after a couple of weeks your recall will improve.
Questions and more Questions
Answering questions is the key to passing the NCLEX. You can know all the content but if you can’t answer an NCLEX style question it will do you know good. The more questions you answer the better you’ll get at answering them. Make it a point to answer some questions every day. It doesn’t have to be a ton. When we do the 8 week guide, every day we’ll give you some suggested questions to answer. Don’t just answer the questions and stop. Review the questions that you got right and more importantly the questions that you missed. Was it the content you didn’t know or was it the style of question that tripped you up.
Down Times
While you’re studying take advantage of down times. If you’re still in Nursing school, you’ll be studying for final exams, tests, Kaplans etc. Remember learning these topics well now and you will just need to review them while you’re studying. If you learn by listening, then find some good podcasts and listen to them while you’re traveling. I did this when I was in the process of getting my Bachelor’s degree in nursing. I traveled a couple of hours every week to a class, during this time I would pop in a cassette and listen to the last class lecture we had.
You can do this!!
