The following was originally posted to Facebook. It received a positive response so I thought it would be worthwhile to add as a blog post. Visit www.store.themantic-education.com for all your lesson plans, powerpoints, worksheets and pretty much everything you need to teach IB Psychology. For all the new IB Psychology teachers who are getting into a bit of a panic …
Understanding IB Psychology with 3 Easy Questions
The IB Psychology course can be a confusing beast and while the official IB Guide is there to tell us what we need to teach (as teachers) and study (as students), it’s not always clear. So I came up with a way of breaking down the IB Psychology course into three simple questions. Thinking about IB Psychology in the following …
Critical Thinking Summarized in ONE WORD!
Understanding the requirements of critical thinking can be a tricky task for students and teachers. While everyone has their own ideas about what “critical thinking” is and what it looks like in IB Psych’ exam answers, this post provides a simple and straightforward answer. I like to define critical thinking as “a critical reflection of the value and validity of one’s knowledge …
Did your IA’s get moderated down? Learn why with our new IA Peer Review Pack
Did you have your IB Psychology Internal Assessments (IAs) moderated down and you’re not sure why? Are you frustrated with the feedback from the moderation? Want to understand the new IA requirements better? If so, for the first time we have opened up a limited time service to help you out. Get your IA Peer Review Pack HERE! What We Offer …
Lesson Idea: Understanding generalizability and population validity
If you want to write excellent evaluations of psychological studies then generalizability is a really important term to know. It’s also called external validity and it refers to the extent to which we could expect the same results in a different context (i.e. do the results apply beyond the study, external to the study?). In this post we’ll focus on population validity (read more …
Lesson Ideas: Understanding Semi-structured Interviews
Conducting your own qualitative research is an engaging and effective way to learn about qualitative methodology. Activity Outline You’re about to conduct your own semi-structured interviews on other students in your class. This will help you understand what a semi-structured interview is, as well as its strengths and limitations. (This activity is designed to go with Lesson 9.1(c) Semi-Structured Interviews …
Lesson Idea – Understanding Etiologies With a Case Study
This lesson is designed to help students understand how reduced function in the vmPFC might be connected with symptoms of PTSD. As with other similar lesson ideas, it tries to make the abstract more concrete by giving real-life examples. The Activity Students are to read the following summary of Due, a fictionary Vietnamese War vetern. After reading the summary, they …
Lesson Idea: Kahn the Caveman
This lesson comes from the PTSD unit/chapter and will help students understand an evolutionary explanation of the effects of stress (emotion) on memory. It also helps consolidate learning about fear conditioning, which is a key concept in the study of PTSD. Kahn the Caveman! Kahn is living 40,000 years ago. He’s part of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in Southern Europe. …
IA Tip: How to begin your report…
Sometimes the hardest part about writing a good Internal Assessment report in IB Psychology is knowing how to begin. With this simple exercise, students can (hopefully) figure out how to write a great opening couple of lines and really get their introduction off to a flying start. Students can read the following examples and see if they can come up …
So you want to assess ethical considerations?
One way of evaluating studies in psychology is to consider whether or not the study might have ethical issues. When evaluating ethics, many students want to jump straight to condemning studies by saying something like, “This study was unethical because…” I would refrain from making such condemnations and using this definitive language because it’s often very hard to completely write-off …