By Gemma Bott At last the final half term of the year has arrived. The time of year when you can get caught up with all of those jobs you’ve been putting off or just not had time to do. For secondary school teachers, exam classes have left, hopefully leaving extra PPA time in the […]
Read moreIn this post I’m going to look at ideas for introducing mental disorders. The AQA specification states students need to know and understand behavioural, emotional and cognitive characteristics of phobias, depression and OCD before considering each of the named disorders from a specific perspective: behavioural approach (phobias explanation and treatment), cognitive approach (depression explanation and treatment) […]
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Two key animal studies are named by the AQA specification: Lorenz’s research with goslings and Harlow’s study of infant rhesus monkeys. Here’s a lesson plan for the topic. Introducing the topic Enter the phrase, ‘unusual animal friends’ into a search engine to find lots of examples of unlikely animal attachments. Either show the class a […]
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This topic contains a lot of vocabulary that students may not have previously encountered. I find it useful to take time in the lesson to discuss the meaning of key words to help students understand the function or location of different aspects of the nervous system. Please note, a version of a lesson PowerPoint has been […]
Read moreIn my experience the most effective way of helping students understand the experimental method is through carrying out an experiment with the class. The Teacher’s Companion (handouts 137 and 138) contains resources to conduct a class memory experiment or you could run a simple Stroop test as explained below. The following activities could be used […]
Read moreStarting the course with a brief focus on approaches provides students with a better understanding of what psychology actually is and allows links to be made to the concept of psychology as a science. The approaches will then be revisited later in the course when studying Approaches in Psychology (Paper 2 AS / Paper 2 […]
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