The first step in teaching schema theory is getting students to comprehend the abstract concept of “schemas” in the first place. In my experience, takes a couple of lessons at least. In our ThemEd Facebook group for IB Psychology Teachers (Join Here) I recently asked our members for some help in coming up with ideas. There were so many great …
Teaching Tip: 3 ways to save hours of teaching time
As we’re all figuring out the new course, including course plans, this first year or two you might be feeling like you’re behind and you’re worried about getting everything covered in time for the exams. This post will explain how you can cut masses of content from your course, while still being assured your kids will be fine for the …
Schema Theory and Stereotypes
One way to explain how stereotypes are formed is to use the claims of schema theory. To recap, schema theory argues that we organize information in our mind by unconsciously creating categories (these categories are the schemas). We do this because we encounter millions of units of information on a daily basis and if we didn’t simplify this information into …
Key Study: Stereotypes, Social Identity Theory and the Out-group Homogeneity Effect (Park and Rothbart, 1982)
Background Information This study can be used to support the out-group homogeneity effect’s explanation of stereotype formation. The out-group homogeneity effect is a hypothesis that claims members of in-groups will perceive members of their own group as being more diverse than an out-group and they will perceive out-group members as being more similar to one another. If things are homogeneous …
Lesson Idea: Origins of Conflict
Your Task There are five resources below that you will need to complete this task. Working with your group, it’s a race to see who can answer this question first: All of these conflicts started for the same reason. What is that reason? Source 1: The “Beaver Wars” (Warpaths2peacepipes) This article summarizes a conflict in North America in the late …
Schema Theory: A Summary
Updated, July 2020 Schema theory is perhaps the most difficult theory in psychology to comprehend. But once you understand it, you’ll see the effects of schema everywhere. In this post, we’ll break down the theory step-by-step. What is schema theory? Schema theory’s central claim is that our knowledge of the world is organized and categorized, which can influence our cognition …
Lesson Idea: Acculturation Strategies
This activity is designed to help students understant Berry’s four different acculturation strategies. Read the summaries below of how these immigrants have adjusted to life in their new culture. What strategy have they used? Assimilation, integration, separation or marginalization? Read about the four different strategies in this post. Monica – Is a 16 year old Egyptian girl who moved to …
What is “acculturation?”
Acculturation is the process of interacting with a new culture and adjust to life in that new culture. How we acculturate can affect our behaviour, including our mental health. In IB Psychology, we’re required to study how this process of interacting with new culture can affect our behaviour. For this reason, when you see the term “acculturation” it might be …
Lesson/Revision Idea: The Two Minute Drill
How it works… Put two minutes on a timer (I use a trusty kitchen timer) Project a possible exam question, maybe one for a topic that you’ve been working on or revising Students have two minutes to outline a plan of how they’d answer that question A4 pieces of paper cut in half are good to use Collect all answers …
How do we “explain enculturation”?
The new enculturation topic can be confusing and tricky. I think it’s by far one of the hardest topics to write about in IB Psychology. Hopefully this post will provide a bit of help to go along with the explanations in IB Psychology: A Students Guide. What do you need to know? What is enculturation? What influences enculturation? How can enculturation …
10 Example Exam Answers!
CRACK THE IB CODE WITH OUR EXAM PREP PACKS These example answers will show you how surprisingly simple it is to get a 7! These ten example answers (+ 2 bonus answers) demonstrate how to write excellent answers by following a very simple structure. They also include examiner-style commentaries that explain what is required to get top marks. UPDATE: WE ARE WORKING ON EXAMPLES FOR THE NEW SYLLABUS …
Teaching Tip: 10 Ways to Teach Studies
I’ve found that talking about study after study in IB Psychology can become a little tedious, not just for me but for the students, too. I like a bit of variation and these ten activities could be applied to any study. Picture puzzles Murder mystery Painting picasso’s Replication Re-enactment Silent sorting Unscrambling Memory tests Speed dating Consolidating quizzes Here they …
Quizlets: Enculturation and Acculturation
The following Quizlets will help students revise key terms and studies for the enculturation and acculturation topics covered in IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide. Enculturation/Acculturation Key Terms Quizlet (Link) Enculturation/Acculturation Key Studies Quizlet (Link) A link to these have been included in the unit plan in the Social Influence Teacher Support Pack (Part I). Travis DixonTravis Dixon is an IB Psychology …
The MAOA (“Warrior”) Gene and Violence
In IB Psychology you need to be able to explain at least one example of how behaviour could be influenced by genetic factors. In this post, we’ll look at why a variation of the MAOA gene (a.k.a the “warrior gene”) could be linked with antisocial behaviours like aggression. There are two explanations: a simple one and a complex one. We’ll …
Love and Marriage Support Pack is Now Available
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added another support pack to the store. Chapter 5 – Love and Marriage is now ready to roll. Go to our store (link) and you’ll find our support packs We’ve tried to make the resource better by implementing some feedback: We’ve made them easier to edit so teachers can adapt them more easily We’ve …
Exam Tip: How to explain prevalence of disorders
If you’re studying Abnormal Psychology as one of your options in IB Psychology it’s important that you can explain differences in prevalence rates. In the old syllabus you have to: Discuss cultural and gender variations in the prevalence of (one or more) disorders. In the new syllabus it just states: Prevalence rates and disorders The key here is much like my …
When drug trials go wrong…
When testing a new drug there always has to be volunteers for the first human participants to take the drug. But what happens if the trial fails. Like, fails really badly? This is what happened in 2006 when eight male volunteers signed up to be participants in a “first in humans” study. The treatment was a proposed cancer treatment, but …
So you want to assess population validity?
If you’re reading this it might be because you’ve written something like this in your answer and tried to fob it off as critical thinking: “One of the limitations of this study was that it has a small sample size and so lacks population validity.” The thing to remember when trying to show critical thinking is that it takes …
5 reasons why evaluating every study is a bad idea.
I’ve been teaching the new IB Psychology course for two months and haven’t evaluated a single study in my class. In this post you’ll see why. If you’re evaluating all the studies you’re using in your course, I’d strongly recommend dropping this approach in favour of some alternative approaches. In this post I’ll explain why I think “evaluating as you …
5 teacher tips for evaluating studies
This post goes with my other post about why it’s a bad idea to evaluate studies “as you go.” Tip 1: Drip-feed critical thinking extensions when students are ready… I introduce evaluative points of studies when individual students are ready for it. In all of my lessons I follow the very basic CHACER structure. The E is for Extend and …
Clinical Drug Trials, PTSD and SSRIs
This post is designed to be used in lesson 4.6 in the PTSD unit plan. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of drug therapy using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat PTSD, we need to consult the research. The most common way the effectiveness of drugs are tested is through a carefully controlled experiments. These experiments are also known …
Key Studies: Dopamine and Love (Fisher et al. 2005)What happens in the brains of people in love?
What happens in our brain when we see the person we love? Why do we fall in love and stay with one person? What is the relationship between love and dopamine? These are some of the questions Helen Fisher and her colleagues set about asking in their 2005 fMRI study, “Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for …
Flashbulb Memory Theory (Brown and Kulik, 1977)
Flashbulb memories are “memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event.” (Brown and Kulik, 1977). For example, remembering where you were when you found out you got accepted into your dream college, that a loved one had passed away or a public news event like the death of a …
Teaching Idea: Question Counters
Question-driven lessons are by far the most effective way to cause learning and the students that ask the most questions tend to achieve the highest. But if your students are anything like mine, there’s always a few who like to hide in the shadows and never ask questions, or they struggle and toil away on their own thinking that it’s …
Wason Task Studies
Wason Task studies provide some evidence to support the idea of two systems of processing, as described in the dual processing model of decision making. To recap, the dual processing model of decision making posits that we have two systems for processing information: System One: fast, automatic and intuitive System Two: slow, controlled and rational In the Wason Task, participants …