Coloring Books Are Powerful Study Tools (And They Help Manage Stress)

When I was an undergraduate, a friend at another college showed me thecoloring book she was using for her anatomy class. Yikes! A coloring book for acollege anatomy class?! Honestly, I thought the idea wasridiculous. Even though my friend swore to me that it helped her learn anatomy.But then I took a close look at that coloring book and realized that it wasn ' t exactly like those circus coloring books I loved as a child. These drawings weremuch more detailed. They included the importantstructures of the human body that I needed to know. Yet, it stilllooked like fun!When I became an A&P teacher, I remembered that experience and looked further into coloring books as learning tools for human anatomy and physiology.What I found was thatcoloring exercises have several advantagesin studying when compared more traditional study methods —such as reviewing notes and highlighting textbooks. These include:Coloring an anatomical diagram is multisensory. Besides reading and spatial vision processing, your brain is also processing your kinesthetic or " muscle " senses. Therefore, you are using more parts of of your brain to process the information. And that means that you are forming more memories than when engaging fewer senses. More " copies " of these memories formed makes it easier to retrieve those memories later, when you need them.Coloring exercises take time. Therefore, doing them forces you to slow down. You can ' t merely skim over notes, diagrams, or text as you might whe...
Source: The A and P Student - Category: Universities & Medical Training Tags: anatomy anxiety books family stress study groups study tips time Source Type: blogs