Self-Motivation

People who have studied successfully for a psychology degree have in common the ability to study independently. This means that they are able to plan their own study time, find out important information for themselves, meet deadlines, and produce their own work to a high standard. For most, it also means the ability to adopt a critical approach when discussing a particular theme. In order to be able achieve these you need a strong sense of self-motivation. But motivating oneself is not easy for many of us and it is a skill we need to learn to acquire. A couple of techniques you might find useful are:

•  Thinking in the future and looking at the past.

An observation many academics make is that most mature students (those who did not go to university immediately from school or college but a little later in life) often produce work to a very high standard. They seem to be more concerned with their own progression through a course than students who came to university straight from school or college. One reason might be that mature students, having missed the opportunity first time around or having deliberately decided to put off university for a few years, are in a better position to value the course and the qualifications they are taking. They may realise more so than younger students that graduates get more desirable jobs and better salaries than nongraduates. So, if you are a younger student, try this: Imagine that you are 10 or more years older than you are now. You are looking back at your past. You are wondering how things could have been different. You start wondering why you didn't put in a few hours a week more of private study. You now know that had you spent more time studying you would probably have got a much better overall grade. Instead, you tended to squander your time and your money doing other things, some of which you couldn't even remember doing afterwards! So, the message is to remember that this is your opportunity to get a good degree. You are unlikely to get a second chance. The better the overall grade you get, the more opportunities that are likely to come your way. These opportunities lead to more fulfilling careers and lifestyles.

•  Go on, impress yourself.

Ask people why they do the things that they do, and in a lot of cases you'll find that they do things to impress others. We try to impress our peer group, our siblings, our parents or carers, other people we care about, and our teachers and tutors. However, when we try to impress others we often lose sight of what our own needs and goals are. We become driven by the goals and expectations of others, rather than what we might ideally prefer for ourselves. A better strategy, perhaps, is to try to impress yourself . Do things in such a way that when you look at what you have done afterwards you are impressed. If you can impress yourself then perhaps what you have achieved is substantial. If you fail to impress yourself then you have let yourself down. Set your own standards and aim to achieve them in your work. Your tutor will be impressed at your work too and this will reflect in the marks you are awarded. Although I recommend this approach to life in general, in terms of your studies, if you try to write essays to impress yourself then you are quite likely to impress your tutor (provided you adhere to the guidelines here and those of your tutors).

•  Resist pressure from your peers.

One reason why I have focussed on impressing yourself is because we often try to impress our peers. For students, their peer group is largely made up of fellow students. Most of us, if not all of us, want to be liked by our peers and we behave in ways that meet with their approval. Peer pressure is true for 10-year-old children as it is for people in their 60s. The dilemma is how to balance peer pressure (doing things that are more valued and liked by our peers than possibly by ourselves) with long term genuine self-interest. You see, yielding to peer pressure often runs against long term self-interest. For example, excessive neglect of studies in favour of spending time with friends satisfies a short term goal but in the long run it can be detrimental to your future career aspirations. The student who studies hard and gets the better grades will be the one future employers will be fighting over. That student will probably have more choices in their future and a better lifestyle. So, the message is try to balance study time and social time, and do not always yield to pressure from your peers to do something else when you really need to be studying or writing that essay or lab report.

Using primary and secondary sources

A short cut for some students is to copy a lot of text from books and internet sites, rather than produce their own work. This is known as plagiarism and is a form of cheating. The penalties for cheating can be severe and so it is to be avoided. There now exist a number of computer applications that can search huge databases (and databases that include those searchable from Google and many others not available on the internet). The chances of getting caught are becoming increasingly high for those who cheat. Your psychology tutor also makes a distinction between primary and secondary resources. Primary resources are articles that are written by a researcher about his or her research, and mostly take the form of journal articles and occasionally a chapter in a multi-authored book. A secondary resource is one where the author has reviewed, for a primarily student audience, the research of other psychologists and takes the form of a book. It follows that if you simply rehashed the review from a chapter in a textbook then you are not presenting ideas in your own words, you are merely restating the interpretation made by the author of the book and hence your work is close to plagiarism. However, if you read the original articles on which the chapter is based then you are in a better position to provide your own interpretation. This way, you then write an essay that reflects your own interpretation and one that is clearly in your own words.

Journal articles

Whenever a researcher carries out his or her experiments and wishes to publish the results, they will submit a report of their work to a psychology journal (e.g. Personality and Individual Differences). The editor of the journal has the job of deciding whether the report submitted should be published in the journal. This decision is based on a number of factors, such as, suitability of the topic for the journal, importance of the topic area, importance of the results obtained, clarity of the writing and so on. To help the editor decide, the article is peer reviewed. This means that between two and four other psychologists working in a related area will be sent copies of the article to evaluate. The reviewers then submit a brief written evaluation of the report, including a grade that reflects their opinion as to whether the article should be published. The editor collates the reviews and makes the final decision. Often, an editor will find that more than one reviewer has the same concern (e.g. they may think that the method is unclear in places, or they think that another experiment should be done). In this case they will invite the author to resubmit a modified version of the article. The important point about this procedure is that all journal articles have been peer reviewed. This means that their level of quality is high and that the authors are not making claims that are too difficult to substantiate. Books, on the other hand, are not peer reviewed in the same way. Commonly, books are sent out to other psychologists for a review but it is only on general aspects of the book and it is not scrutinised with the same eye for detail as journal articles are.

The internet

It often amazes me when students complain that they can't find anything about the subject they are writing an essay on via the Internet. Typically they have done a Google search using a few key terms. Yet, most departments or their libraries subscribe to at least one bibliographic database, such as ScienceDirect. You can type the same key words into its search engine and have scores of abstracts on the subject appear in front of you, often many more than you would want to read. The problem with the Internet is that it is rare that full published articles are uploaded onto the Web; instead all you get is someone's lecture notes or someone's strange view of the world. Only use sites recommended to you by your tutors. To research a topic, use a bibliographic database.

Academic writing

When you read psychology books and journals, you may find it quite difficult at times to understand the language being used. Psychologists, as students often point out to me, tend to use a lot of ‘jargon'. However, rest assured that it will get easier the more you study and read psychology.

Psychologists invent and use their own terms for one important reason. Many of the terms used in everyday language have specific meanings (in everyday terms). The terms psychologists invent are there to differentiate between the everyday use of the term and its meaning in psychological contexts. Consider a term like extinction . This word is used in psychology to refer to a particular kind of ‘forgetting' through a particular kind of method. If you were the first psychologist to have discovered the effect, you would have not wanted to simply call it ‘forgetting', since that word has many unwanted associations and implications that have nothing to do with the effect you have just discovered. When a psychologist sees the word ‘extinction' he or she immediately knows the field of study and the precise effect the term refers to. Some of these terms eventually become part of normal language use (such as ‘ego' and ‘short-term memory').

Notwithstanding the importance of the use of specialist terms that have precise and particular meanings in psychology, in my mind the better journal articles are those that are written clearly, where psychological terms are defined, and where nothing is left to ambiguity. One such paper is Crick and Mitchison's on the reverse learning theory of dreaming (which I briefly mention in Chapter 9); another is Searle's paper on whether machines can think (also discussed in Chapter 9). You might not agree with their views, but they are expressed in clear terms and the arguments they present are arranged in a logical order.

As I point out in Chapter 7 when discussing expertise, it probably takes about 10 years to become a master or expert in something, and this includes becoming an expert in some field of psychology.

In sum, the more articles and textbooks on psychology you read, the better will be your ability to write psychologically. Needless to say, your tutor will not expect you to write precisely in the same way as a professional psychologist. Very often when students new to psychology try to do just this, it does not read well at all. Instead you should try to present your arguments clearly and in a straightforward manner. Choose meaning over expression, as it is more important that your tutor has evidence that you understand what you are writing about than it is to write in a style you are not used to. However, at the other extreme are everyday terminologies and idioms which you should avoid using. Be assured that it does get easier, as most final-year undergraduates will tell you.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that since psychologists write about theories and the evidence for and against particular theories, the writing style is closer to that used by lawyers than it is to, say, a script used in a documentary. Some students tend to write in a sort of documentary style. By this I mean that a theory will be discussed as though it were a fact. Programmes like the BBC's Horizon tend to dramatise science as a series of important and surprising discoveries. You should avoid writing like this. In psychology everything is ‘up for grabs' (this is an example of one of those everyday idioms you should avoid using!), which means that we rarely deal with ‘facts', we deal with evidence, rather like a lawyer.

You can imagine that your reader is the jury whom you are trying to convince. The claim of the prosecution is the view or theory you are trying to advance and the defendant's account is the theory you are trying to invalidate. You will cite evidence that the defendant's theory is wrong and evidence that your theory is the better one. You may not be able to prove your theory but may be able to persuade the jury through the clever use of argument given the available evidence. Hence you will find phrases in psychology articles that relate to the evidence as ‘supporting the theory', ‘rendering the theory implausible', ‘being consistent with the theory', ‘causing us to doubt the theory' or ‘increasing our confidence in the theory'.

Writing essays

Two common problems with essays are: (a) the student has chosen a question (say, in an exam) that they perceive to be easy; and (b) the student fails to answer the question. In terms of the former, questions are, as much as possible, equated for their level of difficulty.

An easy-looking question might look easy (because it is general, for example) but it may require a deeper level of analysis than you at first think. In terms of the latter, many students fail to read the question carefully, and ignore key words in the question such as, compare, contrast, evaluate, discuss, and so on. Answer the question in the manner asked of you. So if you are asked to compare classical and operant conditioning, for example, you do not write half your essay on classical conditioning and then the other half on operant conditioning, you compare features of classical conditioning with features of operant conditioning, taking each feature or aspect in turn.

I suspect that when some students do their essays, they write as they read. This means that they haven't read the full story before they commit pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. You must try to read an overview before you begin your essay and then formulate in note form what your main arguments will be. Next write out a series of bullet points that outline, very briefly, the order in which you want to make your main points. Structure your bullet points by arranging them as a ‘to and fro' of the arguments for and against the central issues. You can then take each bullet point in turn and elaborate by filling in the details. Add new bullet points or modify existing ones when required. Remember that your essay should not be a list of points; it should flow well, be structured logically and must answer the question.

One of the main, more general reasons why a low mark is awarded is because the essay reveals too little evidence of reading on the subject. Don't kid yourself into thinking that getting by with little reading will get you a decent mark or even a pass mark – your tutor has extensive knowledge and will see the gaps in your answer and its lack of depth immediately. You must answer the question by drawing on a range of material. You have to show some understanding of the main issues and theories, and you have to be critical, which means evaluating and appraising what you read. Finally, remember that your marker must not need to infer the extent of your knowledge and your understanding, your essay has to provide evidence to the reader that you understand the issues and that you are knowledgeable on the subject.

Essays must have the following:

•  An introduction

You begin by saying what your essay is going to be about. Tell your reader how you are going to answer the question.

•  The main body of the essay

You should define key terms throughout, develop arguments and discuss the evidence. Your essay should read like a debate on the issues.

•  A conclusion

When you have written the introduction and the main body, you should then summarise your whole essay in two or three paragraphs. A good, unambiguous conclusion finishes an essay off well and gets additional marks. A conclusion is a bit like an abstract to a report, only it is placed at the end not the beginning.

Finally, and I'm sure your course leader will remind you of this, hand in your work on time. Don't leave your work until the last minute. PCs (and photocopiers, apparently) have an inbuilt last-minute-panic detector and if you are in a panic an access error at location 56720007GC4 is generated automatically. The machine then hangs but only after deleting all records of your essay. Faulty PCs and printers are no excuse for late essays. Most courses only consider ill health (with documentary evidence) as a legitimate reason for a late hand-in, and it matters not whether it was your dog or your printer that ate your essay – it is still considered your fault.

Writing research reports

I have included a section here on writing research reports because many of the topics covered in cognitive psychology form the basis of the lab practical. It is likely that you will have to write a research report on at least one topic in cognitive psychology. See also the example report in Chapter 10. There is an excellent computer application for helping students write up their research reports and this can be found at www.labwriteup.com.

Study techniques: which ones work?

Many tutors and introductory textbooks will give you all sorts of advice about how to use certain techniques to aid your memory. However, I doubt if they have checked the scientific validity of many of these techniques. I have never advocated the use of mnemonic devices, for example, largely because I never found them to be useful myself. Moreover, they seem to me and to others to be quite inappropriate for the sort of material psychology students have to study. I won't cite the evidence for this assertion but you could read Chapter 17 of Neath (1998) if you need convincing.

So, what does research tell us about how people learn and what the better methods of study are? First, it is worth debunking a few myths:

•  Unless you have a specific condition or recognised disability that affects your ability to retain information, you have an excellent memory and your ability to remember things is much better than you think it is.

•  The claim that we only ever use 10 per cent of our brains and that we have some vast untapped potential is nonsense and meaningless.

What we do know about good study techniques is as follows:

•  Distributed study is better than massed study. If you studied for 1 hour a day for 8 days then you will learn at least twice as much than if you studied for one long 8-hour session. Thus, although the overall amount of time spent studying is the same, doing a little very often is better than doing a lot once.

•  Interestingly, recall of material is improved when studying is soon followed by sleep. This works because it reduces the opportunity to forget through interference from new material. So, if it is appropriate, take a short nap at the end of your study session!

•  Ask yourself why? is the best way to engage with material and to have a deep understanding of issues. Try to think beyond the information presented to you in textbooks or journal articles. Ask yourself why this theory or that theory was developed in the way it was, or ask yourself whether such an explanation is satisfactory or whether a criticism or a claim is justified. You can also ask yourself how? when you read about a behavioural phenomenon: How do people do it? What mental processes must or could be at work? If you accept all of what you read you will have a bland academic mental life as a student, so don't regurgitate from textbooks, think about the issues. Furthermore, if you read a paragraph or an explanation that you cannot understand, even though you may have read it over and over, consult another text on the issue or ask your tutor. Don't feel that you are taking up your tutor's time by asking ‘silly' questions; it's what we are paid to do and what you pay your fees for. You could also join or establish the student psychological society at your college. Get the society to debate issues and even bring in outside speakers.

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This book was first published in 2003 by Crucial, a division of Learning Matters Ltd [ISBN 1 903337 13 5] © 2003 Eamon Fulcher; © 2009 GEFT Consultance Services (geft.co.uk).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Geft Consultancy Services, who may be contacted via www.geft.co.uk.