My natural disposition is to be a bit of a jumped up pr*#k who’s a bit too full of himself, so I’m trying to be more Jonathan Haidt and less Jordan Peterson these days. With this in mind, I recently went on a mental gratitude walk through the new guide and realised five things I love about it.
#5: Learning outcomes are back
Isn’t it nice to be told what we’re expected to teach? In the 2017 curriculum we were given topic titles and had to deduce for ourselves what we had to teach. In the 2009 curriculum, we had very clear learning outcomes. The outcomes were then removed to prevent students from prewriting and memorising answers. Possible exam questions became hard to predict. I found myself continually encouraging teachers to teach to the most probable questions, not every possible question. With learning outcomes back, it’s nice to have a bit more clarity.
#4 Conceptual assessment
Textbook on sale now.
Students memorising scores of notes and example answers is the bugbear for IB administrators. Teachers alike lament that students take this strategy, rather than seeking to understand the content. I do like this idea of unpredictability in the Paper 1 essay where students have to link a topic to one of the six concepts. It allows a clear distinction between factual recall and deeper understanding. After all, critical thinking skills are best assessed when the thinking is unrehearsed and unique. Dumping a bunch of one-line evaluations about “ecological validity” doesn’t cut it.
If I may, the Peterson on my shoulder wants to jump in and say I wish there wasn’t so much content along with the concepts. The two are fundamentally related – you can not thinking critically or conceptually about something you know nothing about. Therefore, our big challenge in this guide is teaching the basic psychological content first and then extending students when they’re ready to develop critical and conceptual understanding. All in a limited amount of time. In the new SL course, this will be a challenge but I’ve got a few ideas that may help and I’m interested to hear yours.
#3: An end to command term tyranny
Command terms, command terms, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. What a win for the good guys that the phrase “command term” has been erased from all marking rubrics in this new guide. I spent years teaching students the nuances between outline and describe and explain. Then after writing scores of my own answers I realized – they didn’t matter. We’re teaching psychology, not verbology. What’s far more important than the command term is the rest of the bloody question. Command terms hijacked our attention which seemed a uniquely Psychology phenomenon not witnessed in other subjects.
Read more about my command conundrum here.
The new guide also answers that age old question – “is a discussion different to an evaluation?” On pg. 48 in regards to Paper 2, Section B with the unseen study it says “This will comprise a question requiring students to discuss a research study with regard to two or more concepts.” And then later on it notes that the “…focus of assessment will be the evaluation of an unseen research study with regard to two or more concepts.” (Emphasis added). We knew it all along.
Command terms can be good when they clarify things. However, I’d argue we only need two for exams: Explain and Discuss. The rest muddy the waters and it’s nice to see this reflected in the new rubrics.
#2: Content is key
If you liked the content you taught in the old guide, you’ll be happy with this one. We can teach most of the same stuff with minor changes. There are a couple of new topics, like conditioning and cognitive load. Some have come back since 2009 like emic and etic concepts, but mostly it’s stayed the same.
The alignment of the approaches into the contexts (i.e. options) also makes it easier to teach interesting topics like criminology, cults and manipulation, while still easily covering the topics as they appear in the guide.
I’m going to make a prediction, too – the concepts will become the new command terms. They will hijack everyone’s focus and hours upon hours will be spent unnecessarily teaching these boring abstract ideas at the expense of interesting psychological content. I’ll share more about this in future posts and videos.
#1: High stakes exams
Hear me out. There’s nothing like a new curriculum to make you appreciate an old one. Let me tell you about New Zealand’s psychology curriculum to give you some appreciation of IB Psych. The 11th Grade (Year 12/Level 2) NZ psychology course has no exam, all internal assessments, with minimal to no moderation (I had one paper moderated in 2023, zero in 2024). The marking rubrics are 1-3 sentences long, a couple of phrases distinguish a fail from top marks, and there are no fully published exemplars. On top of this, teachers get to choose exactly what they want the assessment to look like. It could be an exam, a researcher paper, or a video recorded interview with Grandpa. It’s all on the table.
This might sound like a dream. I thought it was. There’s one problem – pressure makes diamonds. In preparing to step back into IB Psychology teaching, the idea of high stakes exams is exciting. My students learning is a direct result of my teaching. Exams give me an indication every year of how well I taught. With increasing content and challenges, I have to continually invent new ways of making this stuff stick.
An example rubric for NZ psychology. For the life of me I’ve never discerned the difference between a description of a study and a reference to one!
Appreciate normal. My wife and I love this mantra. It’s easy to take what’s normal for granted, and focus on the new negatives that pop up every day. With a change in curriculum, it’s easy to focus on the confusing and muddly bits, and overlook the logical and beneficial.
While significant challenges remain, there are plenty ways to still design and teach and awesome psychology course. I’m excited to start teaching units like morality, personality and motivation, and old favourites like criminology.
Anyway, I hope this was helpful.
Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.