Study Guide Introduction

What follows as advice for studying, for learning the material of this course, is based on psychological science. The study of the mind, and especially of memory, has been a central part of psychology for decades and we have learned quite a lot about how it works. This advice will help you to make the most of your mind as you attempt to learn and remember all the ideas and concepts that you’re exposed to in this course.

1. Begin studying each module by reading the opening few paragraphs of each chapter (each module contains two chapters) and then flipping through the pages of the chapters, looking at the section headings, photo captions, and figures to get a general idea of what will be covered. This preview will help you absorb the material later, by creating a sort of container for what you will be learning.
2. After your preview, begin working through the module, one LO at a time. You will need to budget your time to work through all 10 objectives before you take the test on the module. Don’t try to study them all at once. If you find that your concentration wanders after you work through a couple of objectives, you need to take a break and do something else for a while. Your ability to concentrate is crucial, as you’ll see below.
3. Since you’re doing all this because you’re going to take tests on the material, you need to remember details from the textbook and from your classroom lectures. Memory comes natural to us, but it’s also a skill, and like all skills, it works better with practice. By practicing remembering things from the book, or things from class, you get better at remembering them. One good way to do this is by reading, and then taking a moment (ideally after a short delay) to quiz yourself by asking, “what did that paragraph tell me just now?” Then try to answer it without peeking. (Then you can peek to see if you were right.) Really, you should write notes while reading the textbook, and if you do this you’ll see how much easier it is to remember what you read in the first place.
4. Work with the limitations of your memory system:

1. First, realize that your memory cannot process information that you don’t pay attention to. And human attention is extremely limited, even when we’re wide awake and in a mood to concentrate. For example, despite the popularity of “multitasking,” we’re not good at it at all. Actually, when you multitask you are switching your attention from one task to another; and each time you switch it’s as if you got distracted from what you had been Unfortunately, we typically don’t notice what we miss, so we wind up thinking we’re doing just fine. But research clearly shows that people remember best when they appropriately focus on whatever it is they need to remember. So avoid trying to multitask. When you’re studying, you should be studying. Put away the phone, find a quiet place, and pay attention to the course material. Make time for it.
2. Memory needs some time of its own. As you read, the things you are reading will be in your short-term memory; this memory system is really short, like just a few seconds. What you need to do is transfer the information to your long-term memory. If you bombard your short-term memory with too much information, it can’t keep up. It works best if you can think about each thing so that it connects with something that’s already in your long-term memory (such as those “containers” mentioned in point number 1, above). We’ll describe some strategies for this below, but notice now: it requires some time and mental effort.
3. Long-term memory gets overwhelmed, too. You need to break up your study work into smaller episodes, repeated over time. We call this “distributed practice”; you want to distribute your studying over days and not try to cram it into a short period just before you need information. Also, your long-term memory needs breaks to save the new information; this is called memory consolidation, and it happens when you aren’t putting memory under pressure, which is why we advise you to study for about an hour and then take a mindless break, and we also advise you to get a full night of sleep because memory also uses phases of sleep to consolidate new information.
4. The way you read and think about the information will influence how well it gets consolidated into your long-term memory. You can think of your memories as being stored somehow between shallow and deep; a shallow memory is weak and easily forgotten, while a deep memory is easily remembered. Obviously, you want to create memories for the material that are as deep as possible. The best ways to do this are:
• Elaborate. This means connecting new information to anything that you already know and remember. You elaborate when you stop and wonder if the information fits to something else. This means you have to stop and wonder. The best elaboration is when you connect information to your personal life. Stop and wonder what it means to you, or whether there was something in your life that related to it.
• Write it down. Take notes, from your book, from lectures, from class discussions. This helps in two ways: one, it provides a recording of the information that is not dependent on your memory, so even if you forget what was said you can look at your notes; two, the act of writing is going to create its own memory for whatever you are writing. We call this “dual coding” because you are creating a visual memory (seeing your notes) as well as a thought memory. Two codes are better than one. Even if you feel like you’re following the discussion, take notes. You’re going to need to remember details and not just the gist of the reading or the lecture. Afterward, rewrite these notes to make them more complete. (Your notes probably have abbreviations and gaps because you couldn’t write them fast enough originally. Fill them in while it’s still fresh on your mind.)
• Practice remembering. As mentioned above. We call this retrieval practice, or self-testing. You are going to practice bringing the newly remembered information back to your conscious thoughts. In other words, you’ve just put the memory in, now practice getting it back out. But don’t do this right away – that’s too easy. Wait a few minutes (or hours) and then practice retrieving what should be there. Test yourself often.
• Do it all again. We all overestimate how smart we are, how ready we are for something. But you’re not as ready as you think. You need to work more on it. Sometimes you’ll notice which parts you’re better at and which you’re worse at. If so, take advantage of the awareness and work extra on the parts that you’re worse at. But don’t be misled: it’s easy to think you’re good at something when you’re not yet good enough. Overlearning is best.

5. Avoid useless habits. Many of us grew up developing study habits that just don’t work very well. We might have learned to highlight or underline whatever seems important while we’re reading. But highlighting readings is a weak study skill. It’s relatively passive, and only helps us to skim the material when we go back and re-read it. But re-reading is itself of limited value. We tend to think that if we repeat something over and over it will simply sink into memory. If it does, however, it does so shallowly. The sense of familiarity that you have when you re-read something is not an indication of having a good memory of the content. And rehearsal, the act of repeating something over and over (which a lot of students think is a study strategy), works okay to maintain something in the short-term memory (which would self-destruct in 10 seconds without rehearsal), but it typically creates only a shallow long-term memory. When you re-read, re-read with purpose, always trying to elaborate (but spend more time re-remembering, not re-reading). Indeed, research has shown that many students study inefficiently, choosing less-effective strategies and then thinking those strategies are just fine. The research shows that most students don’t have an accurate view of what works and what doesn’t.
6. And try to avoid making excuses. Most of us have self-doubts that we might keep secret or we might proudly tell others. We’ve all heard people say, “I’m no good at math.” There’s pride in that claim. But it’s an excuse, a self-defeating belief. A person who believes they’re no good at math simply won’t try as hard as someone who doesn’t believe it. Some of these excuses and self-defeating thoughts are less obvious. People like to say they are “a visual learner” as if their brains are especially limited. The problem is, this just isn’t true. Sure, it’s easier to watch a film rather than read a book, but that’s true for your mind as well as your professor’s. What happens is, like the person who says “I’m no good at math,” the person who claims to be this or that “kind of learner” just won’t try as hard when it comes to doing the thing they believe they’re not good at. I can’t cook, I can’t sing, I can’t write love letters. But you know as well as we do that you can if you work on it. Stick to the advice above.

This might all seem like a lot of extra effort, but hey, it’s college and you’re here to work. And you probably know that a strategy that is easy and feels like it works is not the same as a strategy that actually works. So choose what works, choose the strategies that cognitive science has verified as the better ones. Notice that it only involves reading the textbook once. If you spend the effort up front, reading it carefully and thinking about the material as you read, it will pay off in not having to read it much again. You will instead spend the time and energy reviewing your notes and developing your memories, which will give you the most benefit in terms of improved learning. As an added benefit, knowing about study skills is a part of the course (and it’s on the test): see learning objective 10 in Module 1.

And now, we wish you every success in this course,
Your PSY 101 professors

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