Psychology 101 Study Plan

Psychology 101 Study Plan

  Guanda Li

                                                  Psychology 101 Study Plan

            The purpose of this study plan is to provide several strategies to boost my learning for the final exam of Psychology 101. Exam is always a tool to measure the proportion of materials that students remember. In order to achieve a good academic performance,  strategies used in this study plan are application of concepts of human memory and  a series of psychological phenomenon which lead to a better  retention of memory. The three strategies are distributed practice which applying the spacing effect, summarization which involves the deeper level of processing and the generation effect , and  practice test(having a better memorization by taking the advantage of test effect).

           The first strategy is distributed practice which divides study activities into a number of sessions. Distributed practice enables me to process information adequately. The evidence indicates that retention tends to be greater after distributed practice than massed practice. (Rohrer & Taylor, 2006 Seabrook, Brown & Solity, 2005, as cited in Psychology  : Themes & Variations, p. 309).

            In order to boost my learning for the upcoming final exam, I should set up a schedule managing time and dividing study activities into a number of learning sessions . What is more, the longer retention interval also results in longer optimal “break” between practice trials (Cepeda et al as cited in Psychology: Themes & Variations, p.309). The review for the final exam should start as early as possible in order to optimize distributed practice. The amount of time that I plan to spend on studying for the final exam is around 30 hours. I plan to allocate 8 hours on the day before the exam and the rest of time should be divided into 10 learning sessions, on average 2 hours a day during the two weeks before exam. Although the retention may  be better if I divide it into even shorter sessions, it would be less practical for implementation of schedule. The time interval between two separate learning sessions is around one day .  

             The second study technique could be introduced is summarization. Summarizing study materials is normally based on the understanding of these materials which involves semantic encoding, according to levels of processing theory (Craik & Lockhart 1972).                        Levels-of-processing theory proposes that deeper levels of processing results in longer-lasting memory codes (Wayne Weiten, Psychology: themes & variations ). The second step of summarization is to write down main points of materials by using my own words. Remembering information generated by ourselves is easier than remembering information generated by others, which is known as the generation effect. It is also important to notice that information could be well-organized by doing summarization. When we try to summarize materials, we need to connect single pieces of information to groups of similar terms. Summarization requires a more active processing of information than regular memorization, as it not only facilitates the extraction of meaning and also organizes memory.