Question: what are your best tips of revising psychology?

Louise Rodgers answered on 4 Mar 2019:

Good question Simian, and I would say its the same as revising any subject. Firstly, you have to have understood the learning in the first place, so if there were any parts of your lessons or reading that confused you the first time around, go back to them and try a different way of understanding those.

There are lots of psychologists throughout the history of the subject who have researched memory, learning and how we store information – if you want to read about any of those, a great start is to look up Haring and Eaton’s Learning Hierarchies or Craik and Lockhart’s Levels of Processing. This last theory includes methods to aid your memory, like:

• Reworking the information (putting information in your own words or talking about it with someone else, especially if you can teach it to someone who doesn’t know much about it)

• ‘Method of loci’ (if you need to remember a list of items, linking each with a familiar place or route. This is a way to help memorise facts like names, dates, etc if they’re in a list)

• Imagery (by creating an image of something you want to remember, you elaborate on it and encode it in your memory visually). Drawings and/or mind maps are a great way to do this.

If you try all 3 of those methods, it should help you with exams. And its never too soon to start revising! ‘Rehearsing’ information helps, so doing your revision ‘little and often’ is much better than cramming in the few days before the exam. Good luck!