Psychology classes are sometimes a struggle for students, especially for those with little or no background in the subject. For this reason, it is extra important to establish good study habits.
Because psychology is such a diverse field, students may occasionally feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information on the subject. Students of psychology soon realize that the subject covers a huge range of material. An introductory course alone encompasses discussions of psychology's philosophical background, social statistics, biological influences, experimental methods, and much more.
The diverse topics students might study in the field of psychology include social behavior, personality, research methods, therapeutic techniques, and much more.
Because psychology consists of such a broad range of topics, it is important to develop ways of studying and mastering new theories and concepts.
Following a few simple study tips can help psychology students effectively learn new concepts and theories. With good study habits, students can achieve academic success in psychology. The best part? Creating good study habits won't just help you in your psych classes. These same skills and routines will pay off in a big way in all of your college courses.
- The Two Hour Rule: The general rule is that for every hour of time you spend in class, you should spend two hours of your own time studying the material.
- Plan Your Study Time: The amount of time you need may vary, but you should set aside time each week for reviewing study materials. At the beginning of the week, consider the material you need to cover and estimate how long you will need to complete your assignments, readings, and reviews.
- Schedule Study Time: Ideally, you should schedule a specific block of time to devote to each subject. Even when you are busy, set aside short periods of time each day to concentrate on your classwork.
- Think Critically About the Material: Effective studying involves more than just reading the assigned text and skimming through your notes. You need to analyze and understand the material.
- Take Notes: Read through your materials slowly and write down key points. Write down any questions you have about the materials that you can later discuss with your classmates or course instructor.
- Test Your Understanding: Quiz yourself on the material you have just read. If you struggle with certain questions, make note of these areas for additional study.
- Summarize the Main Points: Once you have studied the material, see if you can answer these questions: Can you identify the main concepts covered by the material? Can you think of your own examples of each theory, problem, or concept?
- Take Effective Class Notes: Your psychology class notes should be a summary of what you learned in class, not a transcription of everything your instructor or classmates discussed. Practice taking brief, effective notes that summarize the key points of what was said.
- Go to Class Prepared: Read the assigned chapters before class. If you approach each class discussion with a good understanding of the material, you will be better able to participate in class discussions.
- Individual Study: Your initial study sessions should take place alone. By doing this, you are better able to concentrate on the material.
- Group Study: Once you have a good grasp on the material, utilize review sessions with classmates or study groups. These sessions are a good way to refresh your knowledge of the material before a quiz or exam.
You have probably been told hundreds of times that cramming is a poor way to study for an exam. Hopefully, you remember to attend your psychology classes and take good psychology class notes.
However, even students with good study habits sometimes find themselves needing to cram the night before a big exam.
While cramming for an exam is definitely not the best way to study (and you certainly shouldn't make a habit of it), you can use a last-minute study session effectively to review notes and organize your thoughts.
Tara Kuther, PhD, a Graduate School Expert, has a handy reference guide with tips for how to cram for an exam. She suggests prioritizing the topics you are going to study, reviewing class notes and required readings, and answering questions about the material in your own words.
Other tips that might come in useful:
- Create a quick outline of the topics that will most likely be on the exam. Put a star next to the subjects that are giving you the most trouble, and then study these topics first. Next, move on to the material that you are more familiar with for a quick refresher.
- Don't take on too much. Trying to learn an entire semester's worth of material in one night is an impossible task. Instead of trying to cover every single thing, focus on the material that is most likely to appear on the exam. A quick rule of thumb - if your instructor talked about it in class, it is very likely that it will show up on the test. Use your class notes as a guide for what you should focus on in your cram study session.
- Get some sleep. It might be tempting to stay up all night to try to learn as much of the material as you possibly can, but this strategy can backfire. In all likelihood, you will just end up so exhausted and burned out that you won't be able to perform your best on the exam. Instead, study what you can during your cram session, but still try to get some uninterrupted sleep the night before your exam. If you really need more study time, wake up early the next morning and go through your review materials one more time.
At the start of every new class, sit down and come up with a study plan that will lead to success in the course. A little planning now can save you from a lot of last-minute stress.
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Many students are missing a lesson in a key area that can help guarantee their success: how to study effectively.
It’s common for students to prepare for exams by re-reading class notes and cramming textbook chapters—study techniques that hinge on the assumption that memories are like recording devices that can play back memories during an exam. “But the storage and retrieval operations of human memory differ from recording devices in almost every way possible,” says psychology professor Robert Bjork, PhD, co-director of the Learning and Forgetting Lab at University of California, Los Angeles.
What does help our brains retain information? Study strategies that require the brain to work to remember information—rather than passively reviewing material.
Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulty” to describe this concept, and psychologists are homing in on exactly how students can develop techniques to maximize the cognitive benefits of their study time.
Here are six research-tested strategies from psychology educators.
1. Remember and repeat
Study methods that involve remembering information more than once—known as repeated retrieval practice—are ideal because each time a memory is recovered, it becomes more accessible in the future, explains Jeffrey Karpicke, PhD, a psychology researcher at Purdue University in Indiana who studies human learning and memory.
The benefits of this technique were evident when Karpicke conducted a study in which students attempted to learn a list of foreign language words. Participants learned the words in one of four ways:
- Studying the list once.
- Studying until they had successfully recalled each word once.
- Studying until they had successfully recalled each word three times consecutively.
- Studying until they had recalled each word three times spaced throughout the 30-minute learning session.
In the last condition, the students would move on to other words after correctly recalling a word once, then recall it again after practicing other words.
A week later, the researchers tested the students on the words and discovered that participants who had practiced with repeated spaced retrieval—the last condition—far outperformed the other groups. Students in this group remembered 80% of the words, compared to 30% for those who had recalled the information three times in a row—known as massed retrieval practice—or once. The first group, which involved no recall, remembered the words less than 1% of the time (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (PDF, 288KB), Vol. 37, No. 5, 2011).
Many students assume that recalling something they’ve learned once is proof that they’ve memorized it. But, says Karpicke, just because you can retrieve a fact in a study session doesn’t mean you will remember it later on a test. “Just a few repeated retrievals can produce significant effects, and it’s best to do this in a spaced fashion.”
2. Adapt your favorite strategies
Other research finds support for online flashcard programs, such as Study Stack or Chegg, to practice retrieving information—as long as students continue retesting themselves in the days leading up to the test, says John Dunlosky, PhD, who studies self-regulated learning at Kent State University in Ohio. For flashcards with single-word answers, the evidence suggests that thinking of the answer is effective, but for longer responses like definitions, students should type, write down, or say aloud the answers, Dunlosky says. If the answer is incorrect, then study the correct one and practice again later in the study session. “They should continue doing that until they are correct, and then repeat the process in a couple more days,” he says.
Concept mapping — a diagram that depicts relationships between concepts—is another well-known learning technique that has become popular, but cognitive psychology researchers caution students to use this strategy only if they try to create a map with the book closed. Karpicke demonstrated this in a study in which students studied topics by creating concept maps or by writing notes in two different conditions: with an open textbook or with the textbook closed. With the closed textbook, they were recalling as much as they could remember. One week later, the students took an exam that tested their knowledge of the material, and students who had practiced retrieving the information with the book closed had better performances (Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 106, No. 3, 2014).
“Concept maps can be useful, as long as students engage in retrieval practice while using this strategy,” Karpicke says.
3. Quiz yourself
Students should also take advantage of quizzes—from teachers, in textbooks or apps like Quizlet—to refine their ability to retain and recall information. It works even if students answer incorrectly on these quizzes, says Oregon State University psychology professor Regan Gurung, PhD. “Even the process of trying and failing is better than not trying at all,” he says. “Just attempting to retrieve something helps you solidify it in your memory.”
Gurung investigated different approaches to using quizzes in nine introductory psychology courses throughout the country. In the study, the researchers worked with instructors who agreed to participate in different conditions. Some required students to complete chapter quizzes once while others required them to take each quiz multiple times. Also, some students were told to complete all the chapter quizzes by one deadline before the exam, while others were expected to space their quizzes by meeting deadlines throughout the course. The students who spaced their quizzes and took them multiple times fared the best on the class exams (Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2019).
Although trying and failing on practice quizzes may be an effective study strategy, psychology professor Nate Kornell, PhD, of Williams College in Massachusetts, was skeptical that students would choose to learn this way because many people inherently do not like getting things wrong. He was eager to explore whether it was possible to create a retrieval practice strategy that increased the odds of students getting the right answer without sacrificing the quality of learning. To test this possibility, he led a study in which participants tried to remember word pairs, such as “idea: seeker.” The goal was to remember the second word after seeing only the first one. The students could choose to practice by restudying all the pairs or by self-testing with different options for hints—seeing either two or four letters of the second word in the pair, or no letters at all (Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Vol. 4, 2019).
Most of the students preferred self-testing over restudying, and the results showed that even with hints, the self-testing group performed better on the final test of the words than the restudying group. “It’s a win-win situation because the technique that worked most effectively was also the one that they enjoyed the most,” says Kornell.
Even more important, students think they are learning more effectively when they answer correctly while practicing, which means they’ll be even more motivated to try retrieval practice if hints are available, says Kornell. To apply this strategy, he suggests adding hints to self-generated flash cards or quizzes, such as the first letter of the answer or one of the words in a definition.
4. Make the most of study groups
Many students also enjoy studying with classmates. But when working in groups, it’s important for students to let everyone have an opportunity to think of the answers independently, says Henry Roediger, III, PhD, a professor in the psychology department at Washington University in St. Louis. One study highlighted the importance of this: Participants tried to learn words in a foreign language by either answering aloud or by listening to their partners give the answers (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (PDF, 426KB), Vol. 24, No. 3, 2018). As expected, those who had answered aloud outperformed the listeners on a test two days later. The researchers also compared participants who answered aloud with partners who silently tried to recall the answers. Everyone received feedback about whether they had gotten the correct answer. Both groups had comparable performances. “Waiting for others to think of answers may slow down the process, but it produces better retention for everyone because it requires individual effort,” Roediger says.
5. Mix it up
Researchers have also investigated the potential benefits of “interleaving,” or studying for different courses in one study session (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 23, Nov. 4, 2017). For example, rather than dedicating two hours to studying for a psychology exam, students could use that time to study for exams in psychology, biology and statistics courses. A few days later, students could study for the same courses again during another block of time. “This strategy, versus blocking one’s study by course, naturally introduces spacing, so students practice retrieving information over time,” Bjork says.
But the research on interleaving has had mixed results, says Aaron Richmond, PhD, a professor of educational psychology and human development at Metropolitan State University in Denver. “If the concepts from two subjects overlap too closely, then this could interfere with learning,” says Richmond. “But chemistry and introduction to psychology are so different that this doesn’t create interference.”
6. Figure out what works for you
The ability to effectively evaluate one’s approach to learning and level of attainment is known as metacognitive ability. Research has shown that “when people are new to learning about a topic, their subjective impressions of how much they know are the most inflated,” says Paul Penn, PhD, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at East London University and author of the 2019 book “The Psychology of Effective Studying.”
“If your impression of your learning is inflated, you have little incentive to look at the way you're approaching learning,” he says.
To increase awareness about the value of sound study strategies, administrators at Samford University in Alabama invited psychology professor Stephen Chew, PhD, to talk to first-year students about this topic during an annual convocation each fall semester. Though an assessment study, he realized that the lecture prompted immediate changes in beliefs and attitudes about studying, but long-term change was lacking. “Students forgot the specifics of the lecture and fell back into old habits under the stress of the semester,” Chew says.
To provide an accessible resource, he launched a series of five 7-minute videos on the common misconceptions about studying, how to optimize learning and more. Professors throughout the school assign the videos as required classwork, and the videos have been viewed 3 million times throughout the world by high school, college and medical students.
While this form of campus-wide education about studying is somewhat rare, psychology researchers are optimistic that this could become more common in the coming years. “There is a lot more discussion now than even 10 years ago among teachers about the science of learning,” Karpicke says. “Most students do not know how to study effectively, and teachers are increasingly eager to change that.”
Further reading
- Improving Self-Regulated Learning with a Retrieval Practice Intervention (PDF, 923KB). Ariel, R., Karpicke, J.D., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2018.
- Practice Tests, Spaced Practice, and Successive Relearning: Tips for Classroom Use and for Guiding Students’ Learning (PDF, 53KB). Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Dunlosky, J. & Rawson, K.A., 2015.
- Performance Bias: Why Judgments of Learning Are not Affected by Learning. Kornell, N. and Hausman, H., Memory & Cognition, 2017.