Succeeding in
AP Psychology
Psychology
 You will learn a new language that
includes over 500 new terms.
 You will raise your level of thinking.
 You will increase your ability to retain
new terminology, concepts and data.
 You will broaden your understanding of
other subject areas.
Attention
 Nothing will reach your memory without
attending to it.
 There are three steps to attending to
what is being discussed.
 Focus
Make
Active
it meaningful to you
participation
Depth of Processing
 Make information meaningful
 Tie new info to old subjective orientation
 How will this new info affect you or help you
 Repetition is shallow processing and usually
only held in memory for a short period of
time or difficult to recall
Skills and Strategies
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Reading
Writing
Note Taking
Studying
Test Taking
Reading
 Read ahead before the lesson
 Use the SQ3R method
 Survey
 Holistic, global approach to the reading
 Question
 What am I about to read?
 What questions would my teacher pull out to test me?
 Read
 Self-explanatory
 Recite
 Summarize what you read
 Review
 Answer the questions you asked yourself
Writing
 No thesis statement necessary
 Read the question carefully
 Organize your thoughts with an outline before writing
the essay
 Define and Apply
 Define
 Describe or give the definition of the term.
 Psychology is the study of behavior and mental processes
 Apply
 Show how the term/vocab. can be used in the given situation
 Psychology is used to answer why people do the crazy things they do
 Be direct
 Reread your essay to clean up grammatical and
spelling errors that may make it difficult to understand
Studying
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Try to find the material interesting
Don’t Cram - time management
Spaced study periods allow for digestion
Set specific study goals and reward yourself when you
achieve them
Study in a study specific place
Study in the same environment as you test
Overlearn
Mnemonic devices help with depth of processing
Make a funny/interesting connection to the information
TYPES OF MNEMONICS
Single use
mnemonics
ROY
G BIV
 Rhyming
 “righty tighty, lefty loosey”
 Method of Loci or peg word mnemonic
 One is a bun two is a shoe
 Visualize funny images with the term like
hypothalamus controls body temperature, thirst
and other basic body homeostasis function –
hypo-needle thalamus-thermometer
Keyword method
of vocabulary
vocab
keyword
definition
story
Hippocampus
Hippo and/or
campus
Structure in the
brain responsible
for retaining some
types of long term
memory
The hippo came to
the campus hoping
to remember as
much as he could.
Corpus collosum
You try
Thick band of axon
fibers that connect
both hemispheres
of the brain.
You try
Objective Test-taking
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Read the directions carefully
Read the answers before you read the question
Read the question carefully
Skip questions you are unsure about because there
may be clues later in the test
 Eliminate alternatives that you don’t remember
being discussed
 Always mark an answer
Sleep!
 Enough sleep is important – 8 hours
 REM sleep important for forming memory
 REM sleep increases as the night goes on
 5-6 hours can affect memory formation
 Stimulants and alcohol negatively affect
quality sleep