This is a sample course outline that shows how you can cover everything in a logical order. The units are from this textbook. Sample Two Year Course Outline Travis’ IB Psychology Course Outline – SL in One Year This is a one year SL course. The IB recommends 150 hours. Please know I have never taught SL in one year, …
How to get 7s in Paper One?Build a course on content, not concepts.
If you’re struggling to build your course on concepts, this post will explain why. About 12 years ago I realised how irrelevant command terms were for IB Psych exams. I lamented over lost time and energy spent focusing on these, at the expense of better things, like content. Since then I’ve tried to show you all what I learned. I …
In Defense of Memorization
When Winston Churchill was at Harrow School he memorized all 70 stanzas of the poem “Horatius at the Bridge.” Highlands Latin School in Kentucky now gives students “The Winston Churchill Award” for anyone that can do the same. But memorization is a sin in modern education, I hear you say. Why on earth would well-meaning teachers be encouraging memorization? With …
Seriously?
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. IB Psychology curriculums are convoluted and complicated beasts. Luckily, they’re filled with loopholes we …
Essay Introductions: How to write the perfect essay introduction for IB Psych exams.
This post will show you four easy steps you can apply to any exam question to write the perfect introduction. Scroll to the bottom for a simple practice tip. First impressions matter, especially in your IB exams. You’re writing essays in IB Psych to show what an excellent psychologist you are, but you have about 1,000 words and 60 minutes to …
How to evaluate correlational studies….PROPERLY!
“This study was correlational but correlation doesn’t mean causation.” If you think this is critical thinking, think again! Let’s look at three ways to PROPERLY evaluate correlational studies. A correlational study is when researchers measure the strength of a relationship between co-variables by calculating a correlation coefficient. In order to show critical thinking you must give specific reasons why we can’t deduce …
Broken Video Links – Replacement videos for IB Psychology A Student’s Guide TSPs.
This post is designed to help teachers find replacement videos when those in the TSPs for “IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide” are removed. This is also a Facebook thread in our IB Psychology Teacher’s Group but that post can be difficult to manage. Organizing them here I hope will be more helpful. 1: Introduction 2: Criminology 2.2b: BBC Documentary: How …
3 Easy Lesson Ideas: Reflecting on the IB Psych Course
As many of us come to the end of our IB Psychology courses, it’s important to take some time to reflect on everything we’ve learned. This simple lesson idea is a good way for students to do that. It also provides some feedback for the teacher. Someone once asked me, “what’s the highest aspiration you have for your teaching?” It …
Health Project Week 4Week 4 - Interviews
Week 4 is time to reflect and try something a little different. We’re going to conduct qualitative interviews on our classmates to learn about their experiences in this project. There are a few reasons I’ve chosen this activity. One reason is to have students keep in touch with other, another is that it can be done without screens (if you …
Health Project Week 3Week 3 - Analysis and Report
After two weeks of collecting data on health habits and their effects, it’s now time to write up the report. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The Importance of Routine Teachers: Feel free to adapt or amend any of this work in any way …
Health Project Week 2Week 2 - Treatment Condition
In Week 1 the main job was collecting data on a range of health habits (sleep, diet, exercise) and their possible effects. This week, you’re going to choose one of those habits that you want to improve. If you can do better this week, that will be your manipulation of your independent variable. We’ll then see in Week 3 if …
Health Project Week 1Week 1 Instructions - Control Condition
Week 1 is focused mainly on gathering a range of data on health habits (sleep, diet, exercise) and their psychological effects. The big job for students is to figure out what they’re going to measure and how. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The …
Health Self-Experimentation Project IntroA Four Week Project for Online Learning in Psychology
Purpose We are going to learn about health psychology through a self-experimentation project. With school closed and all of us turning to online learning, it’s easy to break our routines and fall into bad habits. Read more: Health Project Week 4 Health Project Week 3 Health Project Week 2 Health Project Week 1 Health Self-Experimentation Project Intro The Importance of …
My best advice for new IB Psychology teachers
The following was originally posted to Facebook. It received a positive response so I thought it would be worthwhile to add as a blog post. Visit www.store.themantic-education.com for all your lesson plans, powerpoints, worksheets and pretty much everything you need to teach IB Psychology. For all the new IB Psychology teachers who are getting into a bit of a panic …
Understanding IB Psychology with 3 Easy Questions
The IB Psychology course can be a confusing beast and while the official IB Guide is there to tell us what we need to teach (as teachers) and study (as students), it’s not always clear. So I came up with a way of breaking down the IB Psychology course into three simple questions. Thinking about IB Psychology in the following …
Critical Thinking Summarized in ONE WORD!
Understanding the requirements of critical thinking can be a tricky task for students and teachers. While everyone has their own ideas about what “critical thinking” is and what it looks like in IB Psych’ exam answers, this post provides a simple and straightforward answer. I like to define critical thinking as “a critical reflection of the value and validity of one’s knowledge …
Lesson Idea: Understanding generalizability and population validity
If you want to write excellent evaluations of psychological studies then generalizability is a really important term to know. It’s also called external validity and it refers to the extent to which we could expect the same results in a different context (i.e. do the results apply beyond the study, external to the study?). In this post we’ll focus on population validity (read more …
Lesson Ideas: Understanding Semi-structured Interviews
Conducting your own qualitative research is an engaging and effective way to learn about qualitative methodology. Activity Outline You’re about to conduct your own semi-structured interviews on other students in your class. This will help you understand what a semi-structured interview is, as well as its strengths and limitations. (This activity is designed to go with Lesson 9.1(c) Semi-Structured Interviews …
The race to the front quiz – a lesson idea
I love the first 5-10 minutes of lessons as I think it’s a really important time to do a number of things that can have a real impact on the rest of the lesson. In our CHACER lesson model, this is the first C – Consolidation. This post will outline one of my favourite consolidation activities – the race to …
Lesson Idea – Understanding Etiologies With a Case Study
This lesson is designed to help students understand how reduced function in the vmPFC might be connected with symptoms of PTSD. As with other similar lesson ideas, it tries to make the abstract more concrete by giving real-life examples. The Activity Students are to read the following summary of Due, a fictionary Vietnamese War vetern. After reading the summary, they …
Lesson Idea: Kahn the Caveman
This lesson comes from the PTSD unit/chapter and will help students understand an evolutionary explanation of the effects of stress (emotion) on memory. It also helps consolidate learning about fear conditioning, which is a key concept in the study of PTSD. Kahn the Caveman! Kahn is living 40,000 years ago. He’s part of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in Southern Europe. …
IA Tip: How to begin your report…
Sometimes the hardest part about writing a good Internal Assessment report in IB Psychology is knowing how to begin. With this simple exercise, students can (hopefully) figure out how to write a great opening couple of lines and really get their introduction off to a flying start. Students can read the following examples and see if they can come up …
So you want to assess ethical considerations?
One way of evaluating studies in psychology is to consider whether or not the study might have ethical issues. When evaluating ethics, many students want to jump straight to condemning studies by saying something like, “This study was unethical because…” I would refrain from making such condemnations and using this definitive language because it’s often very hard to completely write-off …
What should we include in a mock exam? (Year One)
The guidance in this post is going to be most helpful for teachers who are: teaching a two year course using our textbook, IB Psychology: A Student’s Guide …and are following a similar course structure to the one I’ve proposed here. (i.e. Criminology, Social Influence and Quantitative Methods covered in Year One). Here’s what I include in my End-Of-Year Exam for …
Lesson Idea: Understanding thematic analysis
The aim of the activities in this lesson is to help students understand the process and purpose of conducting a thematic analysis in qualitative research. It is not necessary to study how qualitative data is analyzed in the new IB Psychology curriculum, but it could be useful to help deepen your understanding of qualitative methods (and it could be used in …