{"id":15065,"date":"2025-02-27T02:38:20","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T17:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/?p=15065"},"modified":"2025-03-28T02:43:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T17:43:24","slug":"seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/2025\/02\/27\/seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Seriously?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the new IB Psych curriculum we’ve been given 45 hours to teach “data analysis and interpretation.” No thanks. I’ll have a hard enough time staying awake in that let alone my students. Here’s a workaround that will give you 20 extra hours in your course.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

IB Psychology curriculums are convoluted and complicated beasts. Luckily, they’re filled with loopholes we can exploit for our own gains. The huge amount of time (90 hrs) given to the HL extensions for surprising lack of content means we can still teach these well and use the leftover time elsewhere in the course.<\/p>\n

The 90 extra hours of HL time is to cover the three extensions (motivation, culture and technology) and 45 hours for the “data analysis and interpretation.” Could you imagine teaching stats for 45 hours, on top of the 30 hours you’ve already covered in the four class practicals and 20 hours in the IA? In an HL course that’s 40% research methods. No thanks.<\/p>\n

Here’s how I plan on teaching HL. In this post, I’ll focus just on the research methods part of Paper 3. In future posts I’ll explain my big plans for motivation, tech and culture.<\/p>\n

HL courses have plenty of extra time to find. SL courses, sadly, will be crammed. The only option is to cut back a context like Development and teach it to SAQ level (i.e. know the key terms and the topics). That could free up 10-15 hours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cut 45 hours to 25<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The curriculum overlooks the fact we need class time for things like practice tests, real tests and mock exams, let alone class time to revise for these kinds of things and to teach students how to write exam answers. My advice is to use 20 hours from the HL extensions for revision and teach a 25 lesson unit on Psychological Research Methods\u00a0<\/strong>for HL students only. This could be spread out over the course if you have HL only classes every week, or could be a big chunk of HL only time at the end of the course, depending on your timetabling.<\/p>\n