PSYCHOLOGY Di Long Year 10 students continued to promote the importance of scientific rigour within psychological investigations by creating and implementing their own research on fellow Year 10 Knole Academy students. Students operationalised their independent and dependent variables through two-tailed hypothesis and used the self-report method to gather their data on a wide variety of topics; from the effects of social media on mental health, to possible conflicts arising due to the Covid restrictions. This highlighted the need for clear standardised instructions, objectivity when producing the questions and running the procedure, appropriate statistical analysis and careful evaluative reflection with regards what had been discovered and potential improvements that could improve the validity and reliability of their studies. Students were required to write-up their research in the formal scientific manner, creating raw data sheets, standardised instruction, descriptive
statistics tables, graphical representations of their findings and recommendations for future investigations. Some students successfully navigated excellent computer packages for their analysis and graphical representations. As Year 12 IB students are required to conduct, analyse, evaluate and formally present their own research study and have a high degree of critical thinking and evaluation within their work. Therefore, students have focused their research methods studies on finding creative but objective and scientific ways of improving key studies. Split-half technique, counterbalancing and test-retest have all been implemented to enhance the internal validity, while cross-cultural meta-analysis, gender and age diverse target populations have all been recommended for greater external validity; in the form of ecological, population and face validity.
In addition, students have now mastered Harvard Referencing for the purposes of writing up their study. The Biological Approach to human behaviour plays a huge part in psychological content; both within the IB and GCSE syllable, which is why the IB course started with numerous investigations of localisation and functions of brain lobes, the limbic system, the nervous and endocrine systems. Students put together a 3D model of the key brain areas and attempted to match key terms, functions and results of damage or infection, through the Shower-Cap activity. Thankfully, initial confusion and misplacements, which had auditory stimuli being processed by the occipital lobe (the visual area) and displays of empathy popping up in the parietal lobe (responsible for spatial orientation), all got clarified and students are now well prepared for the forth-coming dissection activity on a pig’s brain, which had to be initially postponed. 29
