An unforeseen curveball in the new curriculum?
IB Psychology

Travis DixonAssessment (IB), Curriculum

Have the new exams thrown up a huge and unexpected curveball?

In writing exam overviews and essay guides, I’ve stumbled across an unforeseen curveball we’re all going to face in this new curriculum. 

In the old curriculum, students had two styles of questions in Paper 1 and 2:

  1. SAQs
  2. Essays.

It was simple. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple. That meant two rubrics, two types of questions, two styles of answer they needed to practice. With enough repetition and some simple scaffolds, over two years most students could understand the assessments. They could display their full range of talents as psychologists and put their best foot forward in the exams.

Now let’s compare the new syllabus. Those same two exams now have eight different types of questions:

  1. SAQs (P1A)
  2. ASAQs (P1B)
  3. Essay (P1C)
  4. Practical 1: Methods (P2A1)
  5. Practical 2: Concept (P2A2)
  6. Practical 3: Compare and contrast (P2A3)
  7. Practical 4: Alternative study (P2A4)
  8. Unseen study w/ concepts (P2B)

The intent behind the new questions was clear – let’s get beyond memorisation and into deeper application and conceptual understanding. Noble aim. This does cause new challenges, though. Now we have more content plus a lot more question types. Unfortunately, I fear this will have the opposite of the desired effect – students will be so consumed with content that they don’t have the time or cognitive capacity left to reach those deeper levels of understanding.

We need to remember – abstract thinking is based on concrete knowledge. You cannot advance to the former without the latter. Good teachers don’t focus on content at the expense of critical thinking – we do it to develop critical thinking. Ironically, the new assessments will be so challenging for many students that I’ve adopted the mindset of “teaching past the exams.” That means preparing students for the exams but also inspiring a love of psychology. Whether they study it at university or not, I want them to observe, question and hypothesise. I want them to think like psychologists.  To be interested in fascinating topics that have real world applications like personal relationships, persuasion, aggression, depression and parenting. This is more important than ever because of the real risk these complex assessments will put our students off psychology.

You cannot think critically or conceptually about something you know nothing about. The best IB Psychology course (and curriculum), therefore, will be one that strikes the right balance between depth of content and challenging critical thought.

There’s a common mentality among IB administrators and teachers – wouldn’t it be nice if we could just focus on teaching psychology and less on the exams? I couldn’t agree more. But like it or not the exams are the product the IB is selling. Moreover, good teaching is teaching to the test (read why here). Curriculum writing 101 means our intended learning outcomes and are assessment outcomes are aligned. The big curveball here is now we’ve added this new layer of  learning outcomes – how to write 8 different answers.

The point of this post isn’t to piss and grizzle for no purpose. I also like a few aspects of the new course and wouldn’t expect anyone to have seen this issue ahead of time (kudos if you did – Valentin I’m sure you did!) I’m writing it raise it as an issue to be addressed in the next curriculum. I probably don’t drink enough IB Kool-Aid to be offered a seat at the next curriculum table, so I’m writing this in the hopes that someone who is (and does) will have this idea in their back of their minds.

Some solutions…kind of

There’s another saying I love – “Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” So what is the solution to this problem: Here are a few ideas:

  1. Start with the SAQs: Explaining psychological topics and finding support examples (the core of SAQs) is a fundamental skill for a psychologist, but one our students haven’t practiced before. I wouldn’t rush into doing A-SAQs or essays or Paper 2 until they’ve had plenty of practice at these
  2. Take-home answers: Experts need critiques whereas novices need praise – removing the pressure of the IB timeframes and allowing students time at home or in class to work on essays can help build their confidence. It will also give us plenty of opportunities to praise their good work. Worried about ChatGPT? Have students recreate their essay plans using exam.net or have open-book tests in class.
  3. Teach all the practicals in one unit. In writing my course, I first tried to do them after each context. I soon found it was confusing, convoluted and repetitive. Lumping them together will streamline Paper 2 Section A exam practice.

If you like the sound of teaching past the exams and a course that tries to balance content with conceptual thinking, you might want to download the first two chapters of my textbook.