The benefit of publishing ideas is you get them tested. Thanks to John Crane who recently showed me I’d overlooked two important aspects of the Paper 1 and Paper 2 assessments (and for Christopher for posting the question). Paper 1B and 2B are linked to the contexts (developmental, learning, health and relationships). This means if a student didn’t learn about all four, they could be at a disadvantage. This contradicts advice I’ve been giving on cutting back or even cutting out development as a context – in this post I’ll review my stance in light of this new perspective.
My Original Advice: Teachers struggling for time could cut back or even cut out altogether human development (as long as they taught enculturation).
The Rationale: This new course is content heavy – a lot moreso than previous curricula. That’s because now there are four compulsory contexts (2-3 of which used to be optional) as well as the approaches. That’s not to mention the in-depth understanding of research methods needed. Yes they don’t need studies, but I’d love to see a +10 essay in Paper 1 C that doesn’t use any research methods or studies. Similarly, Paper 2 is all about research methods now, which it wasn’t before. SL also used to be shorter Paper 1s and 2s, now they’re identical to HL. The only way I could see teachers in an SL course short of time was to cut out developmental.
My New Advice:
- All four contexts should be taught.
- If you are pushed for time you can still “cut back” one context – don’t think about teaching it for Paper 1C, but rather just to SAQ level (for P1B and P2B)
Paper One
Paper 1 B: In this question, students take content knowledge (approaches) and apply it to a “context-specific situation.” The spec paper uses human development as the context. The question asks students to apply SLT in a programme in schools. Now one could argue if students didn’t study developmental psych then they’d be at a disadvantage. In this particular question, I don’t believe so.
However, that’s not to say that future questions might not be directly related to developmental topics. What if the question was something like: “Explain how a researcher might use an etic approach to study attachment.” With this in mind, at the very least students should know the key terms in the “area of study” for each context.
Developmental topics needed to cover: brain development, sociocultural factors in development, stage theories and continuous models, theory of mind, attachment, enculturation of social norms, peer influence, role of childhood experiences.
Updated Advice: It’s important to teach the topic key terms for each context for Paper 1 B. The primary focus of revision for students, however, is the content – the approach topics. It’s impossible to predict which “context-specific scenario” will be in this paper so they should focus on content knowledge first.
Tip: You can find some double-ups in developmental and cover these in other contexts. For example, attachment as a factor in changes in prevalence of addiction (e.g. insecure attachment is on the rise in US – could be a factor in changing prevalence rates of opioid addiction). Brain development can be a biological factor in cognition (neuroplasticity and the hippocampus, for example).
Paper Two
Paper 2 B: In this question, students are given a summary of an unseen study. The “study will align to one of the four contexts.” This means students who understand the four contexts may be at an advantage. That said, if you look at the spec paper below it doesn’t seem like it would matter.
However, while the spec papers do set the tone, we shouldn’t be reading too much into these. There are always errors in these papers. There’s nothing stopping an unseen study to be specifically about, let’s say enculturation, theory of mind or a continuous model of development. It might be an observational study to understand enculturation, for example. Students who know the key terms will be at an advantage.
Paper 2 Spec Paper – republished without permission.
In Summary
In an ideal world you’ve got plenty of time to teach all the amazing content in the IB course and this post is irrelevant to you. If that’s you, awesome. I have a bias against developmental psych. I always have. I think it goes back to my first year of teaching IB Psych and I opened up the textbook to see which option I wanted to teach and I saw Harlow’s monkeys. I’m a softie – I never opened that section of the textbook again. I also think it’s been done a disservice in the previous guide’s structure. Since becoming a father of three, I’ve warmed to the field. I loved writing about morality and personality for the new course and am actually pleased to see that we can fit in personality traits since it’s something I’ve felt has been missing from IB Psychology.
However, if you’re one of those teachers who has SL in one year and you’re not given enough time, you will need to teach all four contexts. However, this doesn’t need to be at essay level. Think about teaching them for SAQ-level only and you’ll be fine.
If you can see in any of my posts where I haven’t corrected this advice, please let me know and I’ll correct it asap. Thanks.
Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.