Psychology - Forgot your username

34 STUDY SKILLS FOR PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS
This is a particularly good technique for annotating a seminar and it will leave
you with a useful map of the ground covered (although you may want to re-draw
it afterwards). A good seminar chair will spend the last few minutes pulling
together the discussion and summarizing the main points covered. If this does
not happen you should try to do it for yourself. It is easy to miss things if you do
not organize your thoughts properly. Remember to leave spaces around and
between your notes so that you can add additional points, perhaps in a different
colour, as you come across them.
Tip: Annotating notes
➢ Develop a convention for annotating anything you read. For example:
? for something you don’t understand
R (references) any reference you wish to follow up
! to mark a particular point that strikes you as significant
E (essay) anything of immediate relevance to your current assignment
D (dictionary) any terms you need to look up
underscore new names or terms.
This simple method of keeping you listening in active mode will help you
to concentrate.
The more you can rehearse and discuss the ideas and information from taught
sessions the better. There is good evidence that university students remember
material much better if they have regularly attempted to summarize and explain
facts and theories in their own words (Butler & Roediger, 2007; McDaniel, Anderson,
Derbish, & Morrisette, 2007). These studies were done by setting students
regular short-answer tests. If your modules provide these, then make the most of
them. If they do not, then get into the habit of identifying a list of the topics you
have covered in the last week and testing yourself on describing them. Either
way, it will pay off. Working in a group and trying to describe something so that
someone else understands it is also a very useful way of discovering if you have
grasped it yourself.
Even going for a coffee or to the pub and discussing the lecture or seminar with
your friends is a very good way of checking your understanding, and will help
you to be more confident when you get into a seminar or start on an essay. Failing
this you could use the chat room (see page 70) on the course website to explore
your understanding with others or check any points.