Best study methods to succeed your psychology degree

How to ace your psychology exams?

Let’s be honest. A psychology degree requires a lot of writing, reading and memorising. With tons of concepts, theories and complicated neurons' name to remember, it can be easy to feel like throwing in the towel. However, don’t give up just yet as this blog post is aimed at giving you 3 main strategies to better recall your lessons.

3 main strategies:

• Understanding what you are learning

• Active recall

• Spacing your revisions

Understanding your lesson

The first ingredient to better remember your lessons is to understand what you are learning. The psychology literature often uses specific terms and concepts which can be difficult to grasp. Since COVID-19, most universities have made an effort to make the lecture content available online so that students who could not attend may still view it. This is the perfect opportunity to go back to the parts of the lecture you did not understand and make notes of them in your own time.

Some professors also put the slides of their lectures online before the actual day of the lesson. To ensure that you will understand the lecture's content on the day of the class, you can skim through the slides and make notes of any difficult terms and concepts. This will help you know when you have to pay particular attention to the lecture and maybe ask questions whenever you have the opportunity.

If you do not have access to the slides of the lecture beforehand you could always write down what you did not understand and look it up as you go back home. Before attempting to simply memorise your lessons, it is crucial that you comprehend them because it will be much more difficult to recall them afterwards.

Some of you may ask how to know if you have actually understood the lesson.

Answer: practising ACTIVE RECALL!

Active recall

When I was in elementary school I used to think that I just needed to read my lessons as many times as possible and highlight the most important bits to remember them. I carried this habit until the lessons became too long to read several times. I could not be more wrong than that.

Research showed that reading the same material repeatedly has low utility in regard of retaining information (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Karpicke and Roediger, 2008; Weinstein et al., 2010). Another problem with my former method is that highlighting the wrong part of the lessons could be detrimental to my performance. Bell and Limber’s study (2010) of psychology students enrolled in an Introductory course demonstrated that a majority of students use highlighting and other text-marking strategies to revise. However, they showed that low-skill readers tend to highlight a greater percentage of texts than readers with higher skills, but they appear to be less adept at locating the text's most pertinent information. This can be problematic as reading comprehension may be hampered by unnecessary text marking (Bell, 2002). As suggested in Lorch et al.’s study (1995) overmarking makes it harder for students to distinguish marked text from unmarked text, which increases the likelihood that they will forget it. In general, students like marking large amounts of material because it requires less processing than picking out the most crucial information. Nevertheless, it has been discovered that pupils recall information better when forced to mark only a little portion per paragraph (Richards & August., 1975). Given this evidence, I then looked for a much more effective method, and that’s when I found active recall techniques.

In fact to actually make sure that we are learning effectively we need to use active recall. Actively recalling a lesson entails crafting questions about the material you are attempting to learn and continually testing yourself on those questions, pushing your brain to retrieve the information.

One way of practising active recall is what I call the blank paper technique :

This method consists in trying to explain a lesson/ concept on a piece of paper with your own words. Tell it as if you were explaining it to a sibling that does not know anything about psychology. You can use drawings, colours and bullet points but make sure that you are able to explain the concept verbally. You could give your presentation to your study partner if you have one. Thanks to this method you will be able to identify which part of the lesson you are not able to articulate and thus what you have not completely understood. After attempting to explain the lesson you can check your notes to see what you forgot or did not explain properly. Once again your study partner can point at aspects you forgot to mention in your presentation.

Another way of memorising your lessons effectively is to divide them into questions and test yourself with flashcards. Various experimental studies have demonstrated the "testing effect," which is the finding that testing previously studied material improves long-term retention over repeatedly rereading the material (Rowland, 2014). According to Kornell's research (2009), studying flashcards in relatively large stacks over several days is the most successful approach as it involves what is known as the spacing effect (see spacing effect section). There are numerous free flashcard apps available that will facilitate your studies such as Anki (available on Windows, OS X, Linux, iPhone, and Android). For the iPhone user reluctant to pay for this app, a web version is also available. Alternatively you can also use the app Notion and its toddle list feature to turn your lesson into questions and hide the answers.

Spacing effect

I know it is tempting to cram a lesson one week before the exams and I have to admit that some people actually perform way better under this kind of pressure. However, if you want to be part of the ones who are not stressed when it comes to exams and want to retain information longer then this advice is for you.

By using the spacing effect, you can improve your memory and retention of knowledge. The spacing effect is the benefit of spreading out repeated study events over time as opposed to massing them. We tend to forget some details over time (Murre, 2015). Therefore, in order to counter this effect, it is essential to revise the content of the lesson regularly. Karpicke (2016) provided evidence that repeated knowledge retrieval improves long-term, meaningful learning. In order to improve long-term retention, he also recommended including two or three additional spaced retrievals in addition to the one successful retrieval.

BONUS: Using colour codes can also help you to determine which subject should be revised more often. RED: Difficult and needs more revision ; Orange/Yellow: Still needs some work; GREEN: Easy, ready for the exam.

Anki uses an algorithm that helps you space your revisions. You will be asked how easy it was to answer the flashcard and it will tell you when to revise it next.

You can always utilise the study planner developed by psychology cap if you like to keep a written record of your progress.

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To conclude, learning can be a long and annoying process yet a critical aspect of any psychology degree. Fortunately, the right methods will make it easier. As shown in this blog post, to retain more information for a longer period of time you need to understand what you are learning, use active recall and space out your revision. Do not hesitate to share with us which methods are you going to apply and keep us updated on the results!

References

Bell, K. E., & Limber, J. E. (2010). Reading skill, textbook marking, and course performance. Literacy Research and Instruction, 49(1), 56–67.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Karpicke, J. D. (2016). A powerful way to improve learning and memory. Psychological Science Agenda, 30(6).

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger III, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. science, 319(5865), 966-968.

Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.

Lorch Jr, R. F., & Lorch, E. P. (1995). Effects of organizational signals on text-processing strategies. Journal of educational psychology, 87(4), 537.

Murre, J. M., & Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PloS one, 10(7), e0120644.

Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: a meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological bulletin, 140(6), 1432.

Weinstein, Y., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2010). A comparison of study strategies for passages: Rereading, answering questions, and generating questions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16(3), 308–316.