The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - How to learn and revise better for psychology interviews and exams

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field,

Starting point is 00:00:32 the principles can work for you. There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide. episode. With Dr. Marianne Trent Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:34 I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Thank you so much for coming back regularly to listen to what I've got to say and what my guests have got to say too. Or this might be your first ever episode. If it is, then welcome along. Why not subscribe whilst you're here? And if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe, like, comment, engage, do all those good things. If you are listening on Apple podcasts, even if you're not, I'd love it if you would take a moment to go along and rate and review the podcast series. If you really like the podcast series and you think it's useful, I'd love it if you consider buying me a cup of herbal tea,

Starting point is 00:02:18 which you can do by going to my link tree on my socials and clicking donate. It does cost me a few hundred pounds a month to produce the podcast so if you do find the content helpful and you can afford to buy me a cup of herbal tea I'd be so very grateful. There is also a link in the show notes. So I know because many of you have been in contact that you are all at different stages of your career. Some of you are doing GCSEs, some of you are doing A-levels, some of you are doing your degree, some of you are doing your master's, some of you are doing your doctorate or your PhD, some of you are even already qualified. So we've got a really big, broad area. Some of you are even working in an unrelated career, considering coming across and jumping ship to the good shit psychology. So I try to create content that's going to be useful for you, whatever level you're at.

Starting point is 00:03:20 And I will make sure that I'm trying where possible to reference how this can be relevant for you wherever you're at right now. So obviously interviews can come up at any time of the year. Exams tend to be sort of summer-ish but if you're doing modular courses they might be all year long as well. Right now as I record this, this is going out in March, but I'm recording this in February 2023. We are in the swing of interview season for educational psychology and clinical psychology. We are starting to hear whether people have got interviews. So I thought it'd be really useful, because I know we all have busy, busy lives, to think about some of the revision or learning techniques that don't work as well as we might think they do. And then come in and talk to you

Starting point is 00:04:19 about the ones that evidence has shown us. We love a bit of evidence, don't we? That evidence has shown us does work. I'm not going to leave you high and dry though. As ever, we do have our compassionate Q&A session. So if you do need or want some extra support with the application or interview process, regardless of what you're at right now, where you're at. You can come along to the sessions and ask me questions. So let me just talk you through the dates we've got for those coming up. Okay, so the Compassionate Q&A dates, they're all free and they're across my socials. A great place to hang out to make sure you catch it is in the free Facebook group, which is the Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent, brackets, free group. You can also catch it live on YouTube. I'm basically Dr. Marianne Trent in all of the

Starting point is 00:05:19 social media places, so you can catch it there. So the first session will be happening on Monday the 13th of March 2023 at 7.30pm and if when you're listening or watching this you're like well that date's already passed Marianne then you'll be able to catch it on replay on my YouTube channel Dr Marianne Trent. Like, subscribe, do all those good things whilst you're there. Come on, be kind. And our second session of this year will be on Monday, the 17th of April 2023 at 7.30pm. And our third will be Tuesday because of the little bank holiday on the Monday, the 2nd of May 2023 at 7.30pm. And if you're listening to this, and it's totally the wrong time of year for you, and you're thinking, well, actually, I'm applying for stuff, I'm not preparing for interviews, then we've got your bases covered there as well. On Dr. Marianne Trent channel, you can access all

Starting point is 00:06:16 of the replays for previous Q&A sessions for application season, not just interview season two. So let's get on with the content for today's episode. And I do hope you find it useful. So the first of the techniques for preparing for exams and interviews that doesn't really work that well, but evidence suggests we think it works quite well, is rereading. So rereading chapters or notes you've made or, you know, summary things doesn't work as well as other strategies. So this research was put together by a psychologist called Dunlosky. And they found that there was some limited evidence that it does work, but that because it's a passive learning technique, that it sort of works, but it's not the most effective. So yeah, I was, to be honest, blown away because I always thought that was the thing to do. That rereading, you're just rereading a whole book or, you know, particular chapters on

Starting point is 00:07:27 topics was going to blow things out of the park. So if you are also like, what? Then listen on, because I need to tell you more about the other stuff that doesn't work as well as we might think it does. Okay, so the second thing that might well blow your mind is highlighting and underlining. That is one of the things that was absolutely my go-to, lining up the desk, getting all the highlighters ready, getting the little tab markers to mark stuff. That was my bag, baby. But actually, there's been evidence to suggest that not only does it not help with our performance, that sometimes it can hinder our performance, because it means that we are learning things in too narrow a sphere, really. And what it doesn't help us to do is to make inferences. And of course,

Starting point is 00:08:27 in psychology, being able to link things to other areas can be really, really important. Whereas if we boiled it all down to, you know, one or two lines, then really, our knowledge is not super dense, is it? You know, it's surface level at best. So don't worry, I'm not going to leave you high and dry. I'm not going to leave you with all the stuff that doesn't work and then not tell you about the stuff that does. So listen on or watch on and there's more great things coming too.

Starting point is 00:09:02 Now, when people are asked again about whether they feel that highlighting is going to be a useful strategy, they absolutely think it is. And even when they're told that it's not that helpful, they might still like to engage in it because it feels kind of comforting, like a safety blanket. So absolutely carry on doing it if you would like to, but do bear in mind there's other techniques that can skyrocket your performance in interviews and tests too. Okay, so the third thing that isn't working as well as we think it might is summarising or making notes. It's been found, again by Dunlosky, that it's got pretty low utility in helping us learn stuff, helping us remember stuff, helping us recall the stuff when we need to. And the theory is, is we're not summarising effectively or efficiently. And we need to be

Starting point is 00:10:02 either taught how to do that better better or just give it a miss altogether because there's other strategies that do work better. It's not something that I was taught at school or uni. You might well have been and if you're using advanced skills in summarising, you might be knocking it out the park but many of us are winging it and just doing what we think is going to be best so yeah if you do like these things then do continue to use them but maybe also use the other techniques that I'm going to be talking to you about too if you are a passionate note taker or you want to use modern ways to think about your preparing or testing yourself I have been really loving the remarkable tablet it's a paper-free tablet, which really helps you organize yourself too. If you'd like a £40, I think it's £40 rather than

Starting point is 00:10:51 $40 off code, then check out the link in the show notes or send me a DM. So let's take a little break here and I will be back along to talk you through the strategies that are really going to help you get to be where you want to be, whether that's passing your exam, whether that is being able to, you know, do as well as you can in your interviews. I will catch you on the other side of this. You can try the Aspiring Psychologist Collective. The Aspiring Psychologist Collective. Hello, my name is Avalon and I'm an undergraduate psychology student. I really enjoyed reading the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and I really honestly just couldn't put it down. I found it really helpful because as I'm in my final year I'm starting to think about

Starting point is 00:12:17 what I'd like to do after uni and up until this point I've been very set on the idea of pursuing an AP role and the Aspiring Psychologist Collective helped me to see that there are so many more options out there that may appeal to me and I'm looking forward to exploring some of these and broadening out my options. And I also really appreciated that people were open about their lived experience and how they navigated this over their psychology journey. I've had lived experience of an eating disorder, so it was really inspiring to hear about how people have brought that into their reflections and how it shaped the clinicians that they are today. Thank you. Okay, welcome back.

Starting point is 00:13:37 So in the first half, we were speaking about the techniques for revision or learning that actually don't serve us as well as we think they do. And that is rereading, highlighting and summarising. So if you have stumbled into this and you want to know why that doesn't serve us as well, then skip back to the start and then come back to this point and we'll pick up from there. If you are still with us, you're listening or watching, then please do like, subscribe, comment and engage. So what works? Great question. So the first of the techniques that's going to start to work really, really well for you is what's called active recall, because that is thought to be much more efficient than just cramming the stuff in there. So the theory is

Starting point is 00:14:32 that when we're trying to get stuff out of our brain, it actually strengthens the neural pathways for us to be able to do so when we need to get it. So we need to be able to practice getting that stuff that we've learned out. We might do that by using practice tests, by doing practice interviews and popping ourselves on the spot. And we might be able to do past exam papers as well. And you might be like, well, seriously, how much of a difference can this make? And there's some evidence to suggest that it's 10 to 15% increase in performance just by having one practice test at the end of each study session that you do. And there's other evidence to suggest that doing that can boost your performance between 30 and 60 percent. Wow imagine that if whatever recent exam or interview situation you were in your performance was boosted

Starting point is 00:15:35 by 30 to 60 percent and again you might be like no that can't be as good as me rereading that chapter four times. That is totally the way to do it. Evidence suggests that people that used active learning during four study sessions performed better than people who just read a chapter four times. Interestingly, students actually did rate in research that they thought active recall was going to be the least effective strategy for helping them to improve their performance. But it was found to be one of the most effective strategies. So what have you got to lose? Give it a while. Try out some active recall at the end of your study sessions and see how you go. So I'm going to take you through some techniques to help you do active recall because you might be like I don't really really know how to do that so let me guide you through those. There's other ideas in a book called Make It

Starting point is 00:16:39 Stick as well and I will link that in the show notes. Wanted to also thank somebody who I follow for inspiring this podcast episode Ali Abdaal and he's a medic but I thought I'd make this specifically relevant to my psychology audience. So you might well be a big fan of flashcards you might well make your own flashcards but technology has moved on a little bit and there is a flashcard app that you can use as well. And it's called Anki, A-N-K-I. And what you can do is you can set the question or the prompt on the front of the flashcard. And then on the back is the information that you need to be able to recall. So you're aiming to help that prompt on the front dig deep into your brain and help you with the active recall, help you with

Starting point is 00:17:32 getting that information out there. And with the Anki app, which is free, I believe, you can also rate how easy you find that. Easy, medium and hard. And if you rate it as hard, it might well crop up again in 10 minutes. If you rate it as easy, it might not crop up again in your flashcard practice for a couple of weeks, because you still need to be able to access the easy stuff, don't you? But of course, the stuff that's harder to learn, you're going to need more exposure to. So one of the things that can be really tricky and that people tell me is really tricky in psychology is being able to remember all of the studies and the research that they need to be able to quote and cite. You know, sometimes you might just write Smith et al,

Starting point is 00:18:19 you know, 2020. But it's really can be useful to remember as many of the authors as we can and of course be able to convincingly talk about the research so um being able to pop on the on the flash card the names of the authors and the year and then on the back giving yourself a little summary of the research and then being able to almost regurgitate that when you need to, either in an exam situation or in an interview situation, will make you look really, really whizzy. You can even use that app when you're learning that information to begin with. So rather than taking notes, which we've been told is not that effective, you can literally make those flashcards as your notes as you're going along. And then use those as part of your active recall,

Starting point is 00:19:12 either at the end of a lecture or the end of a study session. It's that ability to test yourself as you go along, that is going to really lay the foundations for that active recall. It's not just passive strategies. Okay, and the next of the strategies that's going to supercharge your abilities is making notes, but with the book closed. So read what you need to read, and then make notes based on what you can remember. And then when you've made your notes have a read through the book again see what you've missed and then close the book and try to add to that on what you've missed. You might well want to use strategies such as spider diagrams when you're doing that to link your learning to. And the final of our techniques for really boosting your techniques in active learning is rather than just

Starting point is 00:20:06 making traditional notes is to write questions for yourself based on the material so as you're learning it write yourself questions and then answer them so why this works is because it really ramps up the cognitive effort involved in your learning. It's not purely passive. We're not just sponges. We're not going to soak it up. When we do more with the stuff that we're learning, it's more likely that those neural pathways are going to be thrown down in the right way, which is going to help us be able to find them again when we need to be able to get that stuff out of our brain. So I hope you found this really useful. In summary, we want to be, you know, if it feels comforting, if it feels like a safety blanket, then you can still carry on

Starting point is 00:21:01 making notes, summarizing, highlighting, and rereading. But really, in order to do ourselves the ultimate favor, it's really important that we seek to do as much active recall as we can. And ways I would do this is I'd probably, over dinner, get my husband to ask me what I've learned today that's another simple way that you could use or you know if you speak to your mum or a friend on the phone you could say you know could you check in with me even on whatsapp and ask what I've learned today and you know then parrot it out either as a voice note or if you like to type you could type it out so you're really strengthening those neural pathways or perhaps you could look at using your supervision sessions to talk about

Starting point is 00:21:53 some of the things you've learned recently or some of the things you've read recently so you could use a portion of those supervision sessions to get you practicing active recall or to get you practicing interview techniques and styles. If you're at uni or if you're learning in some capacity, then think about how you can test yourself among your cohort, the people you're learning with. How could you set each other little study sessions so that you can all advance? Because it's not a contest. It'd be amazing if you all did really, really how have you found this episode i hope you found it really useful if you have please do leave me a comment if you're watching on youtube please rate and review if listening on apple podcasts tell your friends about us tag tag whoever you like on socials um who think who you think might benefit from this

Starting point is 00:22:47 content um don't forget we've got those compassionate q a sessions coming up as well we've got the first one on monday the 13th of march 2023 at 7 30 p.m we've got the second on Monday the 17th of April 2023 also at 7.30pm and the third is Tuesday the 2nd of May 2023 at 7.30pm and if you'd like even more advice support and guidance do consider coming along to the Aspiring Psychologist membership where for £30 a month we can really help supercharge your skills, expertise and confidence to get you where you'd like to be. Thank you so much for being part of my world. I'll look forward to catching up with you for the next episode of the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, which will be available for you from 6am on Monday. Take care. If you're looking to become a psychologist, then let this be your guide.

Starting point is 00:23:49 With this podcast at your side, you'll be on your way to being qualified. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological wellbeing practitioner. I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind of filled me with confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay. But trust me you will not put the

Starting point is 00:25:01 book down once you start.

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - How to learn and revise better for psychology interviews and exams

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