A level
Psychology
For AQA Exam Board
The ultimate active recall guide
, LEARN EVOLVE VENTURE OPTIMISE
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
This guide focuses largely on the art of ‘Active recall’ and how to utilise
your brain at its fullest capacity. Active recall is essentially the opposite of
traditional revision methods. Rather than inputting information by
reading, highlighting, and trying to retain it; this method teaches you to
output information instead by consistently testing yourself and forcing
your brain to recall it- until it moves over to the long-term memory store.
Think of when you passively memorise a song. You don’t read the
lyrics and highlight them hoping they will stick in your brain. You
sing the lyrics either in your head or out loud, and eventually they
stick in your head for years. This is because you are forcing your
brain to actively utilise that information, which it will then
choose to store long term as it is used often.
The structure of this guide, although it may seem odd, will largely
just be questions. These are short and simple questions that you
need to answer to trigger the process of active recall. That’s it.
*These are NOT exam questions and shouldn’t be treated as
such. These are simply questions surrounding the compulsory
topics that you must do, with the intent to allow you to
memorise key information needed for the exams.*
, LEARN EVOLVE VENTURE OPTIMISE
USING THE ACTIVE
RECALL METHOD
Answer your questions 3 times
Attempt 1: Answer from memory, mark when finished
Attempt 2: Answer open book
Attempt 3: Answer from memory again, mark when finished
Comparison
Compare attempts 1 and 3 and see if there are any improvements
Identify
Highlight all the questions you got wrong in BOTH attempts 1&3.
Repeat process until all questions are answered correctly
, LEARN EVOLVE VENTURE OPTIMISE
ACTIVE RECALL QUESTIONS
This section will be the main body of this guide. Below, you
will find active recall questions that will cover every single
compulsory topic for Year 1/AS and Year 2 A level.