Guide to GCSE Psychology Revision

Getting ready for Psychology GCSE? Our guide contains all you need to know to revise effectively. From putting together a study plan to the best revision strategies and exam technique tips, we’ve got your GCSE Psychology revision covered.

Getting Started

When you’re beginning your GCSE Psychology revision, the first thing to do is review the specification for the exam board you are following. There, you will find a full list of the topics and subtopics for your syllabus: this is the sum total of everything that could come up in your GCSE exams.

Use this as a guide to make sure you have revised everything you need to before your GCSEs. Many students find it useful to make a checklist of all the subtopics in the specification and use it to structure their revision.

It’s important to realise that GCSE Psychology is more knowledge-based than theoretical. Unlike in a subject like Maths, say, where you are required to apply theory to solving new problems, Psychology requires you to remember a lot of content and reproduce this knowledge in the exam.

Learning the key studies in your specification is absolutely vital – including the researchers’ names, what the studies consisted of, what they demonstrated, and the dates. Other essential things to remember are psychological terminology and relevant statistics.

A lot of students find it useful to begin their GCSE Psychology revision by focusing on Research Methods – including ethics, self-reporting, graphs, and experimental design – as these underpin the rest of the content and are relevant for all three Assessment Objectives (AOs) you will be scored on.

Understanding the Content

Before you can memorise the syllabus, you first need to understand it! We recommend taking a pass through your textbook to make sure you grasp all the key concepts before trying to commit them to memory. Going in order through the textbook is usually best, as later topics often refer back to earlier ones.

If there are any topics or subtopics you don’t understand after reading the textbook and exploring online resources, ask a teacher or GCSE Psychology tutor.

GCSE Psychology Revision Techniques

Now you know what to revise for Psychology GCSE, you probably want to learn how to revise. Here are our favourite revision techniques to memorise all the content you need to for the Psychology syllabus.

Flashcards

Generally more effective than long-form notes, flashcards are a very useful tool for GCSE Psychology revision. Each flashcard should contain a question or prompt on one side with the answer on the other.

Once you’ve created flashcards for a topic, make sure you test yourself on them thoroughly. Just writing them out will do very little, all the memorisation comes from regular testing!

You might find The Leitner Box Technique helpful here. A more detailed explanation is available on the University of York website, but in short, this method uses a spaced repetition system with 3-5 boxes to structure how often you review your material.

You start with all flashcards in the first box – this is the box where you review the cards most often. If you answer a card correctly, it moves to the next box, where it is reviewed less frequently. However, if you get it wrong, it returns to the first box so you have to practice it more often. This approach ensures that you spend the most time revising the material you find hardest to memorise.

If you have a willing study partner, tutor, or parent, you can also involve them in your revision. They can quiz you on your flashcards (helping to prevent any sneaky peeks at the answers!) or, for an even more powerful technique, you can try teaching them the material yourself. Being able to explain a concept clearly is a great way to be sure that you have truly mastered it.

Diagrams

Creating diagrams is a really effective way to visualise and remember some of the content in the GCSE Psychology syllabus. Education psychologists have shown that revising the same content in different ways helps to memorise it – so use flashcards for your verbal memory and diagrams for your visual memory.

Subtopics in Psychology that are particularly apt for diagrams include the Multi-Store Memory model, classical conditioning, and social learning.

Exam Technique

So many marks are won and lost in Psychology depending on your exam technique. Luckily, this is something you can incorporate into your GCSE Psychology revision.

Past papers, examiners’ reports, and mark schemes

In the final 4-6 weeks before your exams, you should start to incorporate past paper practice into your revision. Past papers can be downloaded from the website of the exam board you’re following.

You might want to begin open-book and untimed just while you get the hang of the exam format, but you will definitely want to take a number of closed-book, timed practice exams before your final GCSEs, as time management is so crucial to GCSE Psychology.

Once you’ve done a past paper, ask a teacher or GCSE Psychology tutor to mark it for you. You can also review your answers against the official mark schemes, available on the exam board’s website.

Another less well-known resource is the examiners’ reports. These are written every year by the GCSE Psychology examiners and contain a broader analysis of what students did well and what they did badly in that year’s exams. These are really useful for giving a general overview of what the examiners reward and what kinds of answers they don’t like – well worth your time!

GCSE Psychology Exam Technique Tips

• Time management is vital for Psychology
  • Do several timed past papers under exam conditions
  • Have a clear idea of how much time you have per section and even per question in the exam – and stick to it!
• The essay technique is unique for GCSE Psychology
  • Make sure to get a teacher or tutor to mark practice essays for a variety of question types
  • You don’t normally need an intro or conclusion, even for 12-mark questions – this will waste your time in the exam!
• Make sure to refer to psychological theory and research in your responses
  • Avoid ‘common sense’ answers
  • Demonstrate specialised knowledge of psychology
• Referring to psychological approaches like behaviourist and cognitive etc., where relevant, gets rewarded by examiners

Get Extra Help With GCSE Psychology Revision

If you need some extra support with GCSE Psychology revision, we can help.

Our expert GCSE Psychology tutors have years of experience and a proven track record of success: 100% of our GCSE students meet or exceed their predicted grades.

All our tutoring is 1-1, so it’s completely tailored to your unique strengths and weaknesses. Our tutors can help you put together a revision plan, teach you any topics you struggle with, mark your practice essays and provide feedback.

Book a free consultation with one our friendly team to get matched with the ideal GCSE Psychology tutor for you.