How To Revise Psychology AS
admin | April 27, 2008One of the best things about the AS Psychology Course is the way it is broken down into such easy to manage chunks.
The first thing to do is to write out a basic outline of the course - when you see it on paper you will see how simple it really is.
You basically have to revise an theory (E.g. STM) and the associated studies (APFCC).
There is no easy way to learn the theories so just go with the copying out and reading aloud technique.
With the APFCCs (Aims, Procedures, Findings, Conclusion, Criticism/Evaluation) you can try and condense them to around 5-7 line of regular A4.
When you condense it down like this you will see that you only need to know a certain amount per study, don’t revise it like other subjects by remembering whole detailed arguments. For example Peterson and Peterson’s study on duration in STM, for Criticisms/Evaluation just remember ‘Sample + Ecological’. From those two words you can expand out to talk about how the sample was biased (used students) and that it lacked ecological validity - trigrams do not appear in everyday life.
Just do this with each study and you will find it much easier than trying to revise a whole A4 page study.
Another great way to revise is to time yourself doing 6-mark questions, remember in the exam you only have 5 minutes per 6 marker (20 minutes for 18 marker). Doing these gets you used to thinking quickly and getting a good answer down within the time frame.
One important point to remember is make sure you learn the evaluation points well. For an 18 marker - 6 marks on knowledge e.g. outlining the study, and 12 marks on evaluation. As you are writing an 18 marker keep in mind that 2/3 of what you are writing should be evaluation - you can drop a lot of marks even if your knowledge of the studies is perfect.
If you haven’t already then I 100% recommend getting the mini revision guide below. It has condensed the studies down to just what you need to know and has all the definitions you could need!



