RT Q & A
- RT Jaime
- Mar 28
- 3 min read
Question:
Hi I’m in my first semester of RT school and struggling with cardiopulmonary A&P . We are currently on chapter 2 and I feel lost , any tips for this chapter and tips for the course to help me pass this class . Thank you.
Answer:
Hi there! This is a great question that I feel will help a lot of respiratory therapy students. So when you're studying a particular topic in school, you have to identify the best way you learn and more importantly retain information. The way you study depends on the material you're learning. In my eBook, "How to effectively study in respiratory therapy school," I describe four types of learners including, auditory learners, visual learners, tactile kinesthetic learners, and reading/writing learners.
Auditory Learners
This type of learner does great listening to audiobooks, lectures, and believe it or not, by talking/speaking out loud when studying the material. An easy way to describe this is you are a teacher teaching on the subject you yourself are trying to learn. I personally love this study technique as an auditory learner. By repeating the content out loud and explaining to a classroom full of empty seats, you retain the information much better. As I "pretend lectured" to a classroom of empty seats the concepts became much more clear and I retained the information for much longer periods of time. It sounds funny, but by repeatedly lecturing out loud, you retain and go through the concepts fully and in depth.
Visual Learners
This type of learner loves using charts, graphs, perhaps excel spreadsheets. This type of learning includes drawing. In regards to learning Cardiopulmonary A & P this is a fantastic way to learn about blood flow. If you take the time to draw a heart by hand a few times you will begin to remember the blood flow directions and what goes where. So take a diagram from your textbook and basically copy it down on a blank sheet of printer paper. Label each part of the heart and the direction of blood flow and you will better retain the anatomy of the cardiopulmonary system. This style of learning includes making flash cards by hand.
Tactile Kinesthetic Learners
This type of learner is more of a hands on learner. So this would include actually building some kind of cardiopulmonary model. Not just that, but actually moving your finger along your chest and describing the chambers of your heart, lobes of your lungs, and the direction of blood flow for each. You are bringing cardiopulmonary A & P to life by using your own body as a model. Building a model heart would be a cool way to also bring Cardiopulmonary A & P to life.
Reading/Writing Learners
This type of learner is a fantastic note taker and perhaps has a photographic memory while reading textbooks. Their retention comes from taking notes and re-reading those notes later on during study time. There are different styles of taking notes including taking Cornell notes, which is a great way to organize your notes for when you re-read them later on. This style of learning includes flashcards as well.
It's already been proven that when somebody is writing in print format, they are forming more neural connections in the brain to actually retain information and that value actually multiplies when someone writes in cursive. This is because you're making a much more concerted effort to write in cursive compared to writing in print. When you type information, there are far fewer neural networks created to remember info. If you can use multiple styles of learning, like the ones described above, then you will retain way more information.
Checkout this NBRC Board Exam Practice Problem!
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