Matthew Johnston

Personally, I take a flexible, student-led approach. I will ask students to come to me with a list of areas they want to focus on. This may be specific content and topics they want to cover, or they want help writing essays/assignments or preparing for exams. Whatever the issue is I will break these down into bitesize manageable steps and work with them through these steps/chunks.

I tend to use formative assessments throughout my lessons. In other words, I will prepare short questions at the start and end of lessons to assess learning and to just see where you are at. We can be as formal or informal as you like.

For every psychological issue/topic, I tend to go through what the main theories are, the evidence for these theories but importantly the limitations of these theories and the methodological issues surrounding their evidence. For me, having a critical lens is crucial to being a top psychology student. In my undergraduate degree I received an award for top thesis student so I'll be able to prepare you well for writing strong lab reports or essays.

Over my years of teaching (and from cognitive theories) I have learned that *understanding* is more important than simpy *memorising*. I will aim to improve your understanding of core psychological concepts and help you transfer these to other topics and areas.