PSYC 1101 & 1103 sec 001D-003D, Fall 2019: EXAM 3 STUDY GUIDE

EXAM 3: TUESDAY 12/10/19 10:30-12:30 P.M., SCHN 151; #2 LEAD PENCIL REQUIRED!

REVIEW SESSION: Monday 12/9/19 6:00-7:00 PM, SCHN 151; bring questions to have answered, etc.

ON THIS EXAM: Chapters 15, 16, 13
Psychological Disorders Ch. 15
Therapies Ch. 16
Social Psychology Ch. 13

NOT ON THIS EXAM: Chapters 10, 14 (which were only listed as topics to cover if time allowed, which it did not)
Motivation Ch. 10 (including Approaches to Motivation, and Emotions)
Industrial & Organizational Psychology Ch. 14

The third exam will cover everything from AFTER the second exam material (i.e., it is NOT CUMULATIVE back to the beginning of the semester!), through the Social Psychology topics covered on Thursday 12/5, plus some material found only in the reading and not in lecture (see below).

The third exam will have about 40 multiple choice questions drawn from lecture and textbook material and will be do-able in one hour (or less). Don't expect the multiple choice format to mean you'll just be looking through a list of alternatives trying to recognize some familiar information. The emphasis throughout will not be merely on rote memory for facts and definitions, but rather on conceptual understanding of the material and its use in hypothetical situations. For example, unfamiliar questions related to the lecture content may be included, requiring an application of the knowledge you have gained so far. But not in a scary way. You will benefit from studying as if this were partly an essay exam, even though there will be only multiple choice questions on it!

Check the web page for PSYC 1101 / 1103 at http://media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu/psyc1101.html, and in the "Links and Readings" section you can get to the posted PowerPoint slides -- which are by no means an exhaustive account of all the course material, and which don't contain all the detail you will need, but they do serve as an approximate outline of the material and a reminder of some key concepts to know. All required links in the web page "Links and Readings" section are highlighted in white boxes (and listed below, as well); all the rest are just for fun. On the class page you can also find my study tips page (quite long, pretty useful).

Lecture vs. text:
The lecture material is primary; use the text as a resource to support and elaborate the lecture topics.

If something is covered in lecture, you will be responsible for the lecture coverage and all of the required text coverage of that topic as listed on the syllabus, unless I specifically tell you to omit certain pages (see below).

If something is NOT covered in lecture but is included in the assigned text reading, you will be responsible for the text coverage of that topic. But there will be far fewer questions on that type of material than on the first two categories just described, so you can allocate your study time accordingly.

Page numbers for all required reading are listed on the syllabus, and have been modified on this study guide to be more specific.

The King text isn't just a really long story that you read straight through repeatedly. You should read all the assigned material, probably at least twice. But then also use the index to find answers to particular questions that come up in your notes, your reading, or the old exams. Use the summary points at the end of the chapters, and the contents at the beginning of chapters, to help you identify what's there and how it's organized.


What to study:
Start with the slides and the readings listed on the syllabus (Chapters 15, 16, and 13), and then here are my comments and additions:

SLIDES FOR EXAM 3:

REQUIRED LINKS:

Topics in the assigned reading not explicitly covered in lecture that you should study from the textbook:

Here I've indicated which pages you do NOT have to read from the assigned chapters 15, 16, and 13.
Note the nearby topics you want to be sure NOT to skip by accident! (Because of course you'll be reading all assigned pages in the chapters ASIDE from the skippable topics listed here.)

Names to know (roughly in order of appearance in this course):

I recommend knowing names, not because I will necessarily ask a question like "which of these things did Solomon Asch do?" (though I certainly could), but more generally because knowing names is helpful in remembering the content associated with the names. For instance, associating the name Solomon Asch with the line length conformity study gives you another piece of information to help distinguish conformity from other concepts in social psychology like obedience, which might otherwise blend together more confusingly.


General recommendations about studying:
I would make two recommendations about studying for all the exams in this class (and possibly in other classes):

1) First, a common experience is for students to have read the textbook, web links, and their notes, and feel quite secure that they understand everything -- but then not see that understanding reflected in their exam scores. Consider why that might be: looking at the material and having a feeling of understanding is a rather passive way to confirm your knowledge. I too can look at the text, web links, and notes, and feel like I understand them all, yet let's be honest, my understanding is probably quite a bit deeper than yours despite the similarity of the feeling. What you should aim for is not just recognition and sensibleness, but real familiarity and comfort, where you feel like you could actually explain the topic clearly to a fellow student who had a question about it, or even to someone who had no knowledge of it (e.g. a parent or roommate). Not that you literally need to deliver practice lectures to an audience, but maybe that's something to try to imagine, to see where your gaps and shortcomings might be.

2) Second, the multiple choice format often leads students to expect a kind of recognition test where terms are matched up with definition a, b, c, or d, or maybe a concept is described as being about a, b, c, or d. But multiple choice questions (mine included) can require you to think hard about comparisons or contrasts between perspectives, or ways that one idea implies or is linked to another, or applications of the topics to particular situations. For this reason, I find flashcards and the like to be of limited use, maybe good for memorizing what "egocentrism" is for or what the psychodynamic persepctive says, but flashcards tend to focus on isolated pieces of information rather than how concepts are related to one another. It makes sense, for example, to know not just what "egocentrism" means but also which developmental stage it appears in, which it goes away in, how it can be measured, examples, etc., and you're better off studying those questions as interconnected information rather than separate facts. Separate facts are much more confusable than integrated knowledge of the topic. These topics are all addressed explicitly this way in class, so I'm not implying that you need to creatively come up with these explanations; just don't assume that a superficial memory of a term and what it means will suffice. Sometimes students ask me if they just need to know the major points of what we covered, and unfortunately the answer is, no, that's not enough: you need to know the details too.

For these two reasons I usually suggest that the way to think about my exams is to pretend you're studying for an essay exam rather than a multiple choice exam. That way you realize you don't only need to know what the concepts mean, but you also have to be able to link them together and understand why and how they're connected. And you want to know this at a level where you'd be able to produce such an explanation in an essay, because even though you don't have to actually write it, that type of preparation will allow you to make the connections that the questions ask you to make. Students have sometimes said they don't think my questions are too difficult, really -- just that they make you think through them to figure them out instead of instantly answering or not answering correctly. That's exactly my intention.