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42 STUDY SKILLS FOR PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS
a lecturer unfolding a subject with crystal clarity. Unfortunately, not all lecturers
are like Indiana Jones and, particularly as group sizes increase with widening
participation, you will need some strategies for survival.
Lectures form the backbone of most psychology courses and you should
certainly plan to attend them. They provide an overview and framework for the
course, and a guide and introduction to the various topics on the syllabus, giving
key concepts and theories. Do not try to write everything down, you can get
some of the detail from the recommended textbook afterwards or, better still,
before. Handouts from the lecturer are a very useful record and save you having to
scribble things down the whole time so that you can think about what is being
said and make your own additions.
Getting course notes from a friend or from the web, if they are available, is not
an alternative to attending in person. This is not because lecturers get lonely,
though they do, but because you will miss out on the finer detail and the comments
in parentheses that make the subject come alive. (Actually, we once knew
a lecturer, in the days before student evaluations, who we are sure taught in a
deliberately incomprehensible way so that the students stopped coming after
a couple of lectures and he could get back to his research.)
Tips: Active learning in lectures
➢ Attending a lecture is worthwhile only if you do it actively. (If you are going
to doze or chat to your friends, it is fairer to yourself, the other students
and the lecturer to do that somewhere else.) So:
be there on time to hear the lecturer set the scene
take notes – but organize them, during the lecture or afterwards, in
ways that are meaningful to you
identify areas that will need further work, either because the lecturer
skipped over them or because you have not understood what is being
said
add your own thoughts, ideas and queries
ask questions, either during the lecture if given the opportunity, or
afterwards.
There is no need to be shy. Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky (2000) demonstrated
in a fun experiment on what they termed the ‘social spotlight’ effect, that we
tend to overestimate the attention that other people are paying to us. He
persuaded students to wear a Barry Manilow T-shirt into a lecture, to their huge
embarrassment, and found that they massively overestimated the number of
people who noticed.