For years I underestimated just how complex psychology studies are at first glance for brand new IB Psychology students, so I’ve made a deliberate effort in my new course to have a real gradual introduction into studies. For this activity, I like to have students in groups of three to four. They are given four studies from the criminology unit …
Lesson Idea: Thinking critically about correlations
When looking at correlational studies and quasi-experiments it’s important, I think, to allow students to make the obvious conclusion first, which is generally one of causation. But a big part of the IB Psychology course is helping them to understand the mantra: correlation does not mean causation. This activity idea works well as a follow-up to the other activity about causation …
Lesson Idea: Explaining the difference between causation and correlation
This lesson works well with in the introductory unit, topic 1.2, lesson (d) “correlation.” The following TED Talk by Adam Grant is really interesting for a number of reasons and it’s well worth a watch. I like to show students the short segment from 8:25 to 10:30 where he talks about how mozilla firefox and google chrome browser users outperform …
Why we should be “teaching to the test”
This post carries on a rant I had on facebook recently in response to hoity-toity comments about how we shouldn’t be “teaching to the test” and should just focus on teaching psychology to our students. Personally, I think this is a bollocks argument for a number of reasons. For one, as I’ve said before, if you’re not teaching to the …
Demand characteristics: What are they REALLY?
I was reading another research methods chapter in a new psychology textbook the other day and despite it’s excellent content in research methodology, it still (I think) mis-defined demand characteristics. The most common definition of demand characteristics out there goes something like, “demand characteristics are when participants are aware of the aim of the research and change their behaviour in a …
Lesson Idea: Consolidate learning with three levels of recap questions
If you like the CHACER lesson structure, or even if you’re just after a new recapping idea for the start of lessons, I like this activity because like all of my favourites: it takes minimal preparation has maximum student engagement it’s differentiated and relevant and it gives me some basic data on student progress The basic premise is that in …
Mr. Dixon’s experiences with PTSD
The purpose of this post is to make the symptoms and experiences of PTSD a little more real and concrete for students to understand. Often when we talk about symptoms of psychological disorders (e.g. PTSD) we have to be abstract because we’re covering such a wide range of traumas, experiences and symptoms. While I never had PTSD, I did experience …
Teaching Thematically Made Simple
Yesterday I wrote about why I think adopting a linear approach is a bad idea. I think most teachers agree that combining the core and the options makes sense for so many reasons, but some are hesitant because it seems too daunting. They also think it might mean throwing out all their old stuff and starting again. In this post …
5 reasons why the linear approach is a bad idea!
Planning an IB Psychology course can be stressful, even for the most experienced teachers. It’s not surprise then that it can also be incredibly daunting for new teachers. One of your sources of stress may be thinking about which approach to take: do I teach linear or thematic? In this post I’ll outline five reasons why I think the linear …
Thematic? Holistic? Integrated? What do they all mean?
If you’ve been following the conversations on the OCC and facebook forums, you’ve probably read, seen and heard people discussing approaches to teaching IB Psychology using terms like holistic, thematic and integrated. You might have even heard these terms on a workshop. For new teachers, this might be quite confusing, so in this post I’ll just quickly clarify what these …