Flashcard app for psychology studies: Anki for the iPhone

Psychology has a reputation as a soft subject. Anyone who sits General Psychology and Biological Psychology exams in the same first semester stops laughing about it. Perception, attention, memory, language, thinking, plus synapses, transmitters and functional anatomy: that is a mountain of recall material. A Reddit experience report describes the first semesters as heavily shaped by memorizing Anki cards, with statistics then being an almost welcome change of pace.

This page shows you how to work through the mountain of terms with checkst, where flashcards don't help in psychology studies, and why your own subject provides the strongest arguments for spaced repetition.

How the degree is structured

The standard route: a B.Sc. with six semesters and 180 ECTS, followed by a master's with four semesters and 120 ECTS. In the bachelor's, according to the DGPs, you learn foundational, methodological and applied knowledge, namely general, biological and developmental psychology, plus statistics, research methods and diagnostics.

If you want to become a psychotherapist, since September 1, 2020 the path follows the new Psychotherapists Act: bachelor's plus master's in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 300 ECTS in total. At the end stands a state examination consisting of an oral-practical case examination and a course examination across five competence areas. Important for studying from the first semester: for your bachelor's to count toward this master's, you must actually complete the required modules. The knowledge from the foundational subjects is therefore needed beyond the exam.

What fits on a card and what doesn't

The module descriptions make it fairly clear. In General Psychology, terms, theories and empirical results are explicitly tested, as well as scientifically grounded judgments. Developmental psychology adds longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, core theories and assessment of methods. In statistics you must select procedures, carry out analyses in R and interpret results.

A simple rule of thumb follows:

• Good for cards: technical terms, theories and their core claims, central findings along with the condition under which they hold, structure-function assignments in biology.
• Supplementary: statistical terms such as effect size or confidence interval, so you don't have to look them up first in the exam.
• Not with cards: calculating, writing R scripts, evaluating studies. Practice these with exercises and past exams.

A card that only asks for a definition tests only part of what the exam demands. So ask for the finding and its condition rather than the name of an effect.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Slides in, cards out. Open the lecture PDF in checkst's split view: slide on the left, card editor on the right. You read slide by slide and write the card while the context is still in front of you. If that's too slow, have the AI generate card suggestions from the slides, on-device via Apple's Foundation Models or optionally with your own OpenAI key. You go through the suggestions and keep only what you would have phrased yourself.

2. Start small. A Reddit thread cites roughly 10 to 50 new cards per week and subject as a routine, created during the semester rather than in the exam phase. That is an empirical value, not a rule, but a sensible starting point. You set the daily limit for new cards per deck.

3. Let FSRS do the work. checkst plans your reviews with FSRS. The target retention states the probability that you will still know a card when it next comes due. The Anki manual names 90 percent as the default and advises staying below 97 percent, because the effort rises quickly beyond that. And very important: if you forgot it, press "Again", not "Hard". According to the manual, "Hard" means: known, but with effort.

4. Share with your study group. The Psychology student council at Hildesheim explicitly recommends Anki in its FAQ, partly because decks can be exchanged among students. In checkst you create a study group for this, invite via link or QR code, and share decks directly. The group's leaderboard shows who actually studied this week. Decks from Anki come in via .apkg import.

Example cards

Matched to the subject: four cards you can use directly for General Psychology or Educational Psychology.

Notice anything? Every answer hangs on a condition or a comparison. That is exactly what exams ask, and exactly what gets forgotten with pure term cards.

Why this works, scientifically speaking

You are studying the field that supplies the evidence. Roediger and Karpicke showed in 2006 that retrieval holds up better after days than rereading does. In 2013 Dunlosky and colleagues evaluated ten learning techniques and rated practice testing and distributed practice as particularly useful, while highlighting and rereading were rated as of low utility. The spacing meta-analysis by Cepeda et al. summarized 839 studies from 317 experiments. And in 2015 Murre and Dros replicated Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, though with a single test participant.

To be candid: none of these studies examined Anki in German psychology degrees. No one can quantify how much your exam grade will improve.

Limitations

• You learn statistics by calculating. Cards help you keep the terms at hand. But the exam demands choosing procedures, carrying them out and interpreting results.
• Memorizing can be exhausting. The Reddit report above describes exactly this. If a deck only torments you, the cards are often too long or too numerous. Clearing out helps more than gritting your teeth.
• No ready-made psychology decks from us. checkst does not ship its own psychology decks. You build them from your slides or import what your fellow students have shared.
• Apple only. checkst runs on iPhone and iPad. If half the study group uses Android, they are left with exchanging .apkg files via Anki.