Learning objectives tell teachers what to teach and students what to learn. It’s nice to see them back in the new IB Psychology Guide. But…they’ve put me in a quandary – do I use them?
What’s the problem?
Let’s take the approach objectives to begin with. You’ll see below the learning objectives for the sociocultural approach. At first glance, the learning objectives tell us what we need to teach for each key psychological term. However, upon closer inspection I have a few questions:
- Etic approaches – aren’t limitations an evaluation? Why is this in an SAQ? The SAQs require description or explanation, not evaluation.
- Enculturation – “theories of enculturation?” Can someone give me a psychological theory of enculturation? I can name some sociological or anthropological ones (after doing some deep diving), but in my psychology course I’d rather teach the effect of enculturation on behaviour.
Scroll through the guide and you’ll see other confusing objectives, like “the strengths and limitations of a reductionist approach to the study of behaviour” or “the limitations of the argument that behaviour is localized.” You’ll see references to specific contexts like health and well-being. This raises the next big question…
Do we have to teach to the learning objectives?
The Teacher Support Material (TSM) available on MyIB and published April (2025) answers this question for us. See below the extract taken from pg46. It clearly states that the learning objectives are “merely a suggestion.” It’s not necessary to teach to the learning objective since only the “psychological terminology” can be used in the formulation of the exam questions.
But are we sure about that?
If the clarification in the TSM is correct, then SAQs can only have a command term followed by the key psychological term. If this is true, they’d look like this:
- Describe the diathesis-stress model.
- Explain genetic inheritance.
- Explain neuroplasticity.
However, on the same page in the TSM we see two example questions:
Let’s look at the learning objectives and these questions side by side:
That chemical messenger question looks an awful lot like that learning objective if you ask me. The anchoring bias, question, on the other hand, is more consistent with the clarification in the TSM.
So where does this leave us? Well, according to the TSM we don’t need to teach things like the ethics of animal research or theories of enculturation. But how confident are you that a question on “animal ethics” or “one theory of enculturation” won’t appear in the exam? I try my best to give good advice to teachers and students. Who’s to blame if I tell students not to study animal ethics because it’s not an examinable topic and then it appears in an exam? Well, it should be the IB’s but since it’s in the learning objective I’d have to take some responsibility, right? And what good is it to a kid to say, “Sorry mate, the exam writers stuffed up but we can’t do anything about it.”
Exam writers have made mistakes in the past. Who else remembers that essay question on “two cognitive biases” when the guide clearly states “one or more?”
This is my quandary – it’s impossible to know if I should teach to the content in the objective or stick to the terms? If I was writing for just my classroom, this is not such a dilemma. I can only mislead my own students. But I’m trying to write explain clearly and concisely for all students how they can go about revising for their exams. There’s no right answer. But complaining about a problem without offering a solution is just whingeing, so here’s my solution – the best I can do is explain the issue in posts like these and then let teachers and students decide for themselves. Is that a cop out? Maybe. But it comes down to how risk averse you are. If it’s me, I’d teach to the learning objectives if they will help for other parts of the course. For example, knowing about animal ethics could be useful for an essay question. So there’s no harm in teaching it. Evaluating etic and emic approaches, however, is less helpful so I won’t.
My other approach is to write out my own learning outcomes for every topic and I’ll teach to these. Compare mine to the IB’s above and see what you think (Mr Dixon’s Learning Outcomes).
In my opinion, these are simpler and more consistent with the assessment requirements of Paper 1, Section A. I’ve done my best to combine the learning objectives with the key term and my knowledge of IB assessments and past curriculums to state the most logical learning outcomes for Section A SAQs. You can read see all my learning outcomes here.
But what about Section B?
The plot thickens. In Section B, students are given an unseen context-specific situation or scenario and asked to apply their knowledge to it. The TSM provides the following example: [A description of a research study is provided.] With reference to this study, explain the role of models in the study of cognitive processes.
This question seems fine. In fact, this question is further evidence that we should ignore the learning objectives and focus on the psychological terminology. You’ll see below the learning objective says “one or more” but the left column it’s plural – “cognitive models,” just like the question. Therefore, if you taught to the learning objective and taught only one model, your students would be unprepared for this question and you would have been better to teach two models instead.
But I have an issue with this example question. To demonstrate, consider the sample question from the specimen paper below. The question asks them to “explain the value of cognitive models for understanding cognitive processes.” To do this, they need to have a conceptual understanding of the general benefit of cognitive models. This, in my opinion, is an incredibly tricky task. I have a hunch that this specimen paper confused the learning objective from the Learning and Cognition context with the cognitive approach topic. You’ll see below the similarity between this learning objective and the specimen paper question. This is why in this particular example, when the SAQ topics are also potential essay topics, the SAQ learning objectives are less important because students will have more developed knowledge of these topics anyway because they’ll need them for the essay.
Learning Objective from the Learning and Cognition Context
While I’m at it, let’s look at the other example question from the specimen paper:
My simple philosophy in assessment is it’s unfair for me to test my students on something I’ve never taught them. This is why learning objectives were invented in the first place. So my question is – how would my students be expected to know about empathy and/or prosocial behaviour? Neither of these terms appear anywhere in the guide. You might assume that we’d teach empathy in the topic of theory of mind, but it’s not guaranteed. Similarly, theory of mind is a context topic, not an approach topic. So is Section B based on the approach objectives or the context ones? It seems the specimen paper is confused on this issue.
MFW I’m reading some of the spec paper questions.
Where does this leave us?
With these apparent contradictions and uncertainties, here’s my solution:
- Rule my own empire.
- Control the controllables.
- Teach to the most probable questions, not every possible question.
Rule my own empire: My classroom is my empire and I take control of it. This is why I like designing my own learning outcomes and writing my own assessments so I can make sure both are aligned. I use the Guide as just that – a guide. If I make a mistake or the IB posts later clarifications, I’ll adjust accordingly. The worst mistake I ever made as a new IB teacher was ask “what would an examiner say?” As soon as I flipped it and asked, “What do I think?” my teaching improved exponentially. Here’s three ways I rule that little empire that is my psychology classroom:
- Writing my own learning outcomes that are informed by the guide, but adapted from them.
- Teach to AO2 (Explain) for every SAQ key term, not beyond.
- Write my own tests and exams that are consistent with my objectives, rather than relying on the IB’s specimen paper.
Control the controllables: For my students to be confident, I need to be confident. This is why I focus on the things I can control, and I ignore the things I can’t. I cannot control the questions the IB might ask on exam day, but I can control what I teach, how I teach it and how to test it. This means I focus on the certainties in the guide, like the key terms, and take the rest with a grain of salt. In my mind, content is king in this new course. The key terms (“psychological terminology”) are the content I know are guaranteed to be in the exam question, so I plan my course around these.
Teach to the most probable questions, not every possible question: I’m not going to design my course around teaching everything that might appear in an exam. For example, Section B SAQs could be based on any of the four contexts. There are 26 key terms from the approaches and 4 contexts, so that’s 104 possible combinations of topics and contexts. I am not going to teach to every possible one of these combinations. Instead, I’ll teach every key term (which I prefer to call a topic) thoroughly and with the confidence that students will able to transfer that in-depth knowledge to any new scenario.
In the next post, I’ll upload my learning objectives.
Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.