{"id":2719,"date":"2017-03-22T12:31:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T12:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibpsych.themantic-education.com\/?p=2719"},"modified":"2017-03-22T12:31:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-22T12:31:25","slug":"tip-for-cutting-content-3-identities-attitudes-and-behaviours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/2017\/03\/22\/tip-for-cutting-content-3-identities-attitudes-and-behaviours\/","title":{"rendered":"Tip for Cutting Content #3: Identities, Attitudes and Behaviours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing as my last post about dealing with the cognitive extensions seemed to help, I thought I’d share this one. For some reason that I’m not too sure of, the new guide has got a trifecta of effects of cultural influences in the third topic: identities, attitudes and<\/strong> <\/em>behaviours.<\/p>\n

On the surface this appears to be somewhat of a problem. What if the examiners ask a really specific question addressing one of these things? And what about the other topics? There’s so much content, right?\u00a0Not if we’re smart.<\/p>\n

You could teach identities, attitudes and behaviours as separate entities. I find this problematic for a number of reasons, none more so than the fact that we only have ten hours. If it was simply a matter of just the effects of globalization on these three factors, that might be OK. But throw in the other topics like “the individual and the group” and “local and global factors” it begins to add up. I’d rather my students explored psychology’s depths instead of flying over its surface.<\/p>\n

Another approach could be to just teach “behaviours.” In the IB Psychology world “behaviour” is an umbrella term that covers mental processes and<\/em> observable actions. For example, if a student is asked about the influence of hormone\/s on behaviour they can talk about how cortisol may affect memory. Memory is clearly a cognitive process, not an observable action (which is more in line with a traditional definition of “behaviour”), but this is acceptable in IB assessment world.<\/p>\n

What this means for the soc\/cult extensions is that you could teach to behaviour (and ignore identities or attitudes) and hope that this would be accepted, or that the term behaviour would be used in the exam question. But this might make some people nervous.<\/p>\n

But if you were worried about the exam team asking a very specific question that addressed only “identities” and left out attitudes and behaviours,\u00a0and you still wanted to reduce content to have more time to increase understanding, I would teach just the influence of globalization on “identities.” The reason for this is that an identity would fall under the umbrella definition of a “behaviour” so if a question asked specifically about behaviour, effects on identity would be OK. And identity could also be classified as a cognitive process, so that’d be OK on that grounds, too. And an identity is simply one’s attitude towards oneself, so if it asked about “attitudes” I think identity would be OK here, also. And remember, if we’re not asking students to distinguish between such an important distinction as “cognition” and “behaviour”, why would we ask them to make an even finer distinction between “identity” and “attitude?”<\/p>\n

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We can do what we did before as well by reducing overlaps in the topics and the extensions. The three topics are:<\/p>\n

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  1. the individual and the group<\/li>\n
  2. cultural origins of behaviour and cognition<\/li>\n
  3. cultural influences on individual identities, attitudes and behaviours<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If we define “the group” as a cultural group, we can avoid worrying about topic 1 and merge it with “cultural origins\/influences” because these imply an individual is within a group.<\/p>\n

    Similarly, cultural origins and influences are so similar we don’t need to distinguish them; it boils down to the same variable: cultural influences. As we said earlier, cognition falls under the umbrella term of “behaviour” in IB Psychology, so if you really wanted you could cut out behaviour. And as identity is a form of cognition but a very specific one, let’s just focus on identity.<\/p>\n

    This means we can condense the there “topics” into one core concept:<\/p>\n