[Miracle Day]

So if you're reading this, you're either currently studying PY2 or you've completed it.

What is this thread for?

• Discuss PY2, along with our PY1 which we just finished.
• Offer advice on PY2.
• Post your results here if you're in Sixth Form.
• Create a community here, we can regularly chat to one another.
• Study tips

So hey guys! Welcome!

PY1:
So I've got my results back from PY1, I got a B with 62 UMS, 2 marks from an A which is nice because I completely missed out a fifth of the paper. I ended up getting the highest in my school so I'm pretty chuffed about that.

PY2:
So far I've finished the Research methods and are currently on the Case Studies. I've completed Asch, Loftus & Palmer and Buss and I'm currently doing Rahe and Milgram.

So what're you guys favourite Case Studies? Any tips for answering PY2? And what did you guys doing PY3/4 find harder.. PY1 or PY2?

[Sesshomaru24U]

You've already started =O I'm going to start next week. As for the perfect essay for PY2, I haven't got a clue :b I'm just going to try and do a really good essay and give it to my teacher and hope I get really high and then just all my essays similar to that.
Have you completed all the core studies? You know when the exam is?
Got to say though, Rahe study is just so boring xd

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by Sesshomaru24U)
You've already started =O I'm going to start next week. As for the perfect essay for PY2, I haven't got a clue :b I'm just going to try and do a really good essay and give it to my teacher and hope I get really high and then just all my essays similar to that.
Have you completed all the core studies? You know when the exam is?
Got to say though, Rahe study is just so boring xd

Omg Rahe is dull as dishwater! Have you seen all the results we have to learn?!?

I copied some model answers out of the WJEC Psychology book, and say an 12 mark answer plus a few things I added on got marked down to 7/12.. -.-

Obviously as I need 99/120 to get an A overall I need my answers to be almost perfect.

[Miracle Day]

Bump.

[madders94]

This website was a godsend to me - http://tonyryan.net/ contains tips, tricks and example answers for all the questions you may be asked in PY2 (or most of them, at least) - they're worth about 8 marks so it's better to combine what you get in the lessons and text books with these essays but it helped me tremendously (I got an A in the exam last year).

It seems like a hell of a lot, but if you break it down into the bare minimum facts, use flashcards for revision etc, it will really help. And don't get too hung up on remembering the names for alternative evidence etc - it's not necessary, as long as you remember what they found, apparently you don't lose any marks for not remembering the names.

The hardest question is by far the alternative evidence, because it's so easy to get confused, so as soon as you study each piece of research, pick out 4 or 5 alternative evidence studies that will be easy to remember - I think I got rid of my PY2 notes, unfortunately - and learn them, stick them on your bedroom wall, read over them, record them as an mp3 - whatever you can do to help you remember. The rest of the stuff is fairly easy. The exam itself is not hard because it will always be the same questions (the only thing that differs is whether you get two evaluate methodology or two alternative evidence questions), it's the remembering which is the hardest part.

A good memory should see you fine (I didn't do that much revision, to be honest, and got through on a good memory), but I can't stress enough the importance that you DO revise - if nothing else, it'll set you in good stead for PY3 and PY4, where a lot of revision is required.

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by madders94)
This website was a godsend to me - http://tonyryan.net/ contains tips, tricks and example answers for all the questions you may be asked in PY2 (or most of them, at least) - they're worth about 8 marks so it's better to combine what you get in the lessons and text books with these essays but it helped me tremendously (I got an A in the exam last year).

It seems like a hell of a lot, but if you break it down into the bare minimum facts, use flashcards for revision etc, it will really help. And don't get too hung up on remembering the names for alternative evidence etc - it's not necessary, as long as you remember what they found, apparently you don't lose any marks for not remembering the names.

The hardest question is by far the alternative evidence, because it's so easy to get confused, so as soon as you study each piece of research, pick out 4 or 5 alternative evidence studies that will be easy to remember - I think I got rid of my PY2 notes, unfortunately - and learn them, stick them on your bedroom wall, read over them, record them as an mp3 - whatever you can do to help you remember. The rest of the stuff is fairly easy. The exam itself is not hard because it will always be the same questions (the only thing that differs is whether you get two evaluate methodology or two alternative evidence questions), it's the remembering which is the hardest part.

A good memory should see you fine (I didn't do that much revision, to be honest, and got through on a good memory), but I can't stress enough the importance that you DO revise - if nothing else, it'll set you in good stead for PY3 and PY4, where a lot of revision is required.

Thanks! Apparently the model answers on that site aren't 12 marks

[madders94]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
Thanks! Apparently the model answers on that site aren't 12 marks

Nah like I said, they're 8 marks, but combined with the knowledge you get from textbooks (there is one textbook my teacher says you should avoid like the plague, can't remember the name) and handouts in the lesson should bump it up to an 11 or 12 mark answer

My favourite studies in terms of ease of understanding were Milgram and Asch (mainly because I studied them at GCSE so I had an easy couple of weeks whilst everyone else learned it from scratch), and in terms of interest were Rahe (I'm particularly interested in the psychosomatic field) and Rosenhan, the study on how easy it is to get a diagnosis of mental illness.

The ones I found hardest were Gibson and Walk, because there was loads of alternative evidence to learn, and Buss because there was just so much data for the findings!

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by madders94)
Nah like I said, they're 8 marks, but combined with the knowledge you get from textbooks (there is one textbook my teacher says you should avoid like the plague, can't remember the name) and handouts in the lesson should bump it up to an 11 or 12 mark answer

My favourite studies in terms of ease of understanding were Milgram and Asch (mainly because I studied them at GCSE so I had an easy couple of weeks whilst everyone else learned it from scratch), and in terms of interest were Rahe (I'm particularly interested in the psychosomatic field) and Rosenhan, the study on how easy it is to get a diagnosis of mental illness.

The ones I found hardest were Gibson and Walk, because there was loads of alternative evidence to learn, and Buss because there was just so much data for the findings!

Yeah there's a lot for Buss >

Any tips on how to structure the answers?

I love Milgram also <3

[madders94]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
Yeah there's a lot for Buss >

Any tips on how to structure the answers?

I love Milgram also <3

I shall post how I structured my questions either later tonight or tomorrow (boyfriend's coming round in a minute and I don't think he'd appreciate me snubbing him haha )

[madders94]

Okay, I'll split them up into spoilers otherwise it might be a rather long post

Aims and Context

Spoiler:

Show

- Write a little bit about what field it is, if you know - i.e Rahe is psychosomatic
- Give a little bit of background information about the field and why it has interested psychologists.
- Select two or three related studies that were conducted before the research, describe them and maybe say how they influenced this research.
- Conclude by saying why the researcher conducted this study, what he hopes to achieve and what he believes he will find (for instance, with Asch, he found that previous studies [jellybeans and the moving light] were too ambiguous - people could genuinely make mistakes rather than be conforming. He wanted to conduct an unambiguous study where the correct answer was blatantly obvious, to see if people would still conform to the incorrect one).

Procedures

Spoiler:

Show

- Always start with the sampling - what size sample, what method, what age, what gender (this will help you in the evaluation if you can say the sample was andocentric/ethnocentric or any other "centric" which makes it too hard to generalize from) and any other information you have about the sample (were they paid? What socio-economic class were they from? etc).
- After that, it's really quite simple - you just go through the whole experiment, detailing what they did. Be careful not to give away any of the findings or conclusions in the procedures section, you'll need to be able to talk about these extensively in the findings and conclusions, which tends to be the bit you have the least to write about!

Findings and Conclusions

Spoiler:

Show

This one is quite a tough one to structure, because the findings vary so much from experiment to experiment, but a few pointers here -
- Always link any findings/statistics to a conclusion.
- This bit needs a lot of revision - there are a few pieces of research (Buss springs to mind ) where the statistics really are important, and although you will still get marks for saying "______ found that a number of people _______", you'll probably get more for saying "Milgram found that 65% of people carried on shocking to the maximum 450v".
- If they conducted any interviews afterwards to find out what the participants thought or to explain their behaviour, this is important to mention (plus it fills up a short answer!) such as in Milgram when they asked why people shocked up to 450v etc.

Evaluate the Methodology...

Spoiler:

Show

There is soooo much you can write about here, and I don't think there really is any set way of structuring it as long as you get it all in, but this is how I structured mine
- Evaluate the design/procedures, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sampling method, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sample itself - is it a sample that you can generalize from?
- Evaluate in terms of reliability and validity - are there any issues of ecological validity (there are in Milgram's research!)?
- Ethical issues - Milgram (three people had seizures and others showed great discomfort), Gardner and Gardner (some people argued that Washoe should have been allowed to be raised in the wild rather than kept in a lab), Gibson and Walk (the one where they raised kittens in the dark for 28 days and tried to get them to do the visual cliff; the baby one is fine), Asch (deception) are the main ones I can think of with the ethical issues.
- Any other positives or negatives - for example, Rosenhan's study "On Being Sane in Insane Places", may have led to doctors changing the way they diagnosed people - instead of making Type 2 errors [assuming people are ill when they aren't], they may start making Type 1 errors [not diagnosing people who really are ill, for fear of them being pseudopatients]. I believe that's the right way around. IIRC it's actually mentioned in the findings that a few months later, they discovered a lot more Type 1 errors being made. This is a negative point.

The Dreaded Alternative Evidence

Spoiler:

Show

Yep, this is the horrible one. The one everyone seems to dread, and unfortunately, there might be two of them in the exam! Thankfully, I don't think they've ever set two alternative evidence questions [fairly sure we had two evaluate the methodology ones], so you'll hopefully just have to do two methodology questions. With these, again, it's fairly easy to structure.
- Pick out about five studies for each piece of research and learn them. Learn learn learn. Don't worry about names or what year, you don't really need them. If you can remember the name, great, but don't sacrifice actually learning the content of the evidence!
- Condense them down if it'll help with revision.
- Pick ones that are relatively easy to remember, but also ones that do have a strong supporting/contradicting relationship to the study.
- Make sure you don't have all supporting or all contradicting - they want to see that you know about both sides.
- Write out about the study - a brief bit about what they did and what they found, and then link it to the study, say if it supports and if so, what bit does it support and why, and if it contradicts, say what bit it contradicts and why.
- It seems like a hell of a lot to learn, and when you open that exam paper, you'll see the question and think "I can't remember any about this one!", but I found that as I wrote it, bits and pieces started coming back and I was able to write a full answer

The most important thing about this exam is (other than revision) time management, and the way in which you decide what order you'll answer in is crucial. I did mine -

1. Alternative evidence
2. Evaluate methodology
3. Evaluate methodology.
4. Procedures
5. Aims and Context
6. Findings and conclusions.

Basically, getting the worst one out of the way first, then doing the three which are the longest and where I thought I had the most chance of getting good marks because they're my strongest points, and then the last two are the shortest questions - and with the findings and conclusions, there's so many statistics to remember that I thought, if I end up making up a load of statistics and missing out on the points here, I might also have wasted time I could have spent working on the other questions.

Hope this has helped!

[L.O.V.E]

Thanks for this thread!
I'm finding PY2 harder than PY1 and I think my problem is remembering all the details.

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by madders94)
Okay, I'll split them up into spoilers otherwise it might be a rather long post

Aims and Context

Spoiler:

Show

- Write a little bit about what field it is, if you know - i.e Rahe is psychosomatic
- Give a little bit of background information about the field and why it has interested psychologists.
- Select two or three related studies that were conducted before the research, describe them and maybe say how they influenced this research.
- Conclude by saying why the researcher conducted this study, what he hopes to achieve and what he believes he will find (for instance, with Asch, he found that previous studies [jellybeans and the moving light] were too ambiguous - people could genuinely make mistakes rather than be conforming. He wanted to conduct an unambiguous study where the correct answer was blatantly obvious, to see if people would still conform to the incorrect one).

Procedures

Spoiler:

Show

- Always start with the sampling - what size sample, what method, what age, what gender (this will help you in the evaluation if you can say the sample was andocentric/ethnocentric or any other "centric" which makes it too hard to generalize from) and any other information you have about the sample (were they paid? What socio-economic class were they from? etc).
- After that, it's really quite simple - you just go through the whole experiment, detailing what they did. Be careful not to give away any of the findings or conclusions in the procedures section, you'll need to be able to talk about these extensively in the findings and conclusions, which tends to be the bit you have the least to write about!

Findings and Conclusions

Spoiler:

Show

This one is quite a tough one to structure, because the findings vary so much from experiment to experiment, but a few pointers here -
- Always link any findings/statistics to a conclusion.
- This bit needs a lot of revision - there are a few pieces of research (Buss springs to mind ) where the statistics really are important, and although you will still get marks for saying "______ found that a number of people _______", you'll probably get more for saying "Milgram found that 65% of people carried on shocking to the maximum 450v".
- If they conducted any interviews afterwards to find out what the participants thought or to explain their behaviour, this is important to mention (plus it fills up a short answer!) such as in Milgram when they asked why people shocked up to 450v etc.

Evaluate the Methodology...

Spoiler:

Show

There is soooo much you can write about here, and I don't think there really is any set way of structuring it as long as you get it all in, but this is how I structured mine
- Evaluate the design/procedures, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sampling method, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sample itself - is it a sample that you can generalize from?
- Evaluate in terms of reliability and validity - are there any issues of ecological validity (there are in Milgram's research!)?
- Ethical issues - Milgram (three people had seizures and others showed great discomfort), Gardner and Gardner (some people argued that Washoe should have been allowed to be raised in the wild rather than kept in a lab), Gibson and Walk (the one where they raised kittens in the dark for 28 days and tried to get them to do the visual cliff; the baby one is fine), Asch (deception) are the main ones I can think of with the ethical issues.
- Any other positives or negatives - for example, Rosenhan's study "On Being Sane in Insane Places", may have led to doctors changing the way they diagnosed people - instead of making Type 2 errors [assuming people are ill when they aren't], they may start making Type 1 errors [not diagnosing people who really are ill, for fear of them being pseudopatients]. I believe that's the right way around. IIRC it's actually mentioned in the findings that a few months later, they discovered a lot more Type 1 errors being made. This is a negative point.

The Dreaded Alternative Evidence

Spoiler:

Show

Yep, this is the horrible one. The one everyone seems to dread, and unfortunately, there might be two of them in the exam! Thankfully, I don't think they've ever set two alternative evidence questions [fairly sure we had two evaluate the methodology ones], so you'll hopefully just have to do two methodology questions. With these, again, it's fairly easy to structure.
- Pick out about five studies for each piece of research and learn them. Learn learn learn. Don't worry about names or what year, you don't really need them. If you can remember the name, great, but don't sacrifice actually learning the content of the evidence!
- Condense them down if it'll help with revision.
- Pick ones that are relatively easy to remember, but also ones that do have a strong supporting/contradicting relationship to the study.
- Make sure you don't have all supporting or all contradicting - they want to see that you know about both sides.
- Write out about the study - a brief bit about what they did and what they found, and then link it to the study, say if it supports and if so, what bit does it support and why, and if it contradicts, say what bit it contradicts and why.
- It seems like a hell of a lot to learn, and when you open that exam paper, you'll see the question and think "I can't remember any about this one!", but I found that as I wrote it, bits and pieces started coming back and I was able to write a full answer

The most important thing about this exam is (other than revision) time management, and the way in which you decide what order you'll answer in is crucial. I did mine -

1. Alternative evidence
2. Evaluate methodology
3. Evaluate methodology.
4. Procedures
5. Aims and Context
6. Findings and conclusions.

Basically, getting the worst one out of the way first, then doing the three which are the longest and where I thought I had the most chance of getting good marks because they're my strongest points, and then the last two are the shortest questions - and with the findings and conclusions, there's so many statistics to remember that I thought, if I end up making up a load of statistics and missing out on the points here, I might also have wasted time I could have spent working on the other questions.

Hope this has helped!

Thanks! That is so helpful!

[Miracle Day]

Did you revise the research methods part?
Revision tips?
This exam is stressful haha -_-

(Original post by madders94)
Okay, I'll split them up into spoilers otherwise it might be a rather long post

Aims and Context

Spoiler:

Show

- Write a little bit about what field it is, if you know - i.e Rahe is psychosomatic
- Give a little bit of background information about the field and why it has interested psychologists.
- Select two or three related studies that were conducted before the research, describe them and maybe say how they influenced this research.
- Conclude by saying why the researcher conducted this study, what he hopes to achieve and what he believes he will find (for instance, with Asch, he found that previous studies [jellybeans and the moving light] were too ambiguous - people could genuinely make mistakes rather than be conforming. He wanted to conduct an unambiguous study where the correct answer was blatantly obvious, to see if people would still conform to the incorrect one).

Procedures

Spoiler:

Show

- Always start with the sampling - what size sample, what method, what age, what gender (this will help you in the evaluation if you can say the sample was andocentric/ethnocentric or any other "centric" which makes it too hard to generalize from) and any other information you have about the sample (were they paid? What socio-economic class were they from? etc).
- After that, it's really quite simple - you just go through the whole experiment, detailing what they did. Be careful not to give away any of the findings or conclusions in the procedures section, you'll need to be able to talk about these extensively in the findings and conclusions, which tends to be the bit you have the least to write about!

Findings and Conclusions

Spoiler:

Show

This one is quite a tough one to structure, because the findings vary so much from experiment to experiment, but a few pointers here -
- Always link any findings/statistics to a conclusion.
- This bit needs a lot of revision - there are a few pieces of research (Buss springs to mind ) where the statistics really are important, and although you will still get marks for saying "______ found that a number of people _______", you'll probably get more for saying "Milgram found that 65% of people carried on shocking to the maximum 450v".
- If they conducted any interviews afterwards to find out what the participants thought or to explain their behaviour, this is important to mention (plus it fills up a short answer!) such as in Milgram when they asked why people shocked up to 450v etc.

Evaluate the Methodology...

Spoiler:

Show

There is soooo much you can write about here, and I don't think there really is any set way of structuring it as long as you get it all in, but this is how I structured mine
- Evaluate the design/procedures, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sampling method, and say whether it was a strength or a weakness.
- Evaluate the sample itself - is it a sample that you can generalize from?
- Evaluate in terms of reliability and validity - are there any issues of ecological validity (there are in Milgram's research!)?
- Ethical issues - Milgram (three people had seizures and others showed great discomfort), Gardner and Gardner (some people argued that Washoe should have been allowed to be raised in the wild rather than kept in a lab), Gibson and Walk (the one where they raised kittens in the dark for 28 days and tried to get them to do the visual cliff; the baby one is fine), Asch (deception) are the main ones I can think of with the ethical issues.
- Any other positives or negatives - for example, Rosenhan's study "On Being Sane in Insane Places", may have led to doctors changing the way they diagnosed people - instead of making Type 2 errors [assuming people are ill when they aren't], they may start making Type 1 errors [not diagnosing people who really are ill, for fear of them being pseudopatients]. I believe that's the right way around. IIRC it's actually mentioned in the findings that a few months later, they discovered a lot more Type 1 errors being made. This is a negative point.

The Dreaded Alternative Evidence

Spoiler:

Show

Yep, this is the horrible one. The one everyone seems to dread, and unfortunately, there might be two of them in the exam! Thankfully, I don't think they've ever set two alternative evidence questions [fairly sure we had two evaluate the methodology ones], so you'll hopefully just have to do two methodology questions. With these, again, it's fairly easy to structure.
- Pick out about five studies for each piece of research and learn them. Learn learn learn. Don't worry about names or what year, you don't really need them. If you can remember the name, great, but don't sacrifice actually learning the content of the evidence!
- Condense them down if it'll help with revision.
- Pick ones that are relatively easy to remember, but also ones that do have a strong supporting/contradicting relationship to the study.
- Make sure you don't have all supporting or all contradicting - they want to see that you know about both sides.
- Write out about the study - a brief bit about what they did and what they found, and then link it to the study, say if it supports and if so, what bit does it support and why, and if it contradicts, say what bit it contradicts and why.
- It seems like a hell of a lot to learn, and when you open that exam paper, you'll see the question and think "I can't remember any about this one!", but I found that as I wrote it, bits and pieces started coming back and I was able to write a full answer

The most important thing about this exam is (other than revision) time management, and the way in which you decide what order you'll answer in is crucial. I did mine -

1. Alternative evidence
2. Evaluate methodology
3. Evaluate methodology.
4. Procedures
5. Aims and Context
6. Findings and conclusions.

Basically, getting the worst one out of the way first, then doing the three which are the longest and where I thought I had the most chance of getting good marks because they're my strongest points, and then the last two are the shortest questions - and with the findings and conclusions, there's so many statistics to remember that I thought, if I end up making up a load of statistics and missing out on the points here, I might also have wasted time I could have spent working on the other questions.

Hope this has helped!

[madders94]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
Did you revise the research methods part?
Revision tips?
This exam is stressful haha -_-

I revised the research methods part a bit, but not much at all to be honest - I basically just made sure I knew the definitions of the different things (reliability, validity, confounding variables etc) and the issues that might arise (and trust me, this knowledge will help you SO MUCH for PY3, so if you work hard at it now it'll be worth it). There's not much else you can do.

Revision tips.... lots of past papers and lots of practice essays really. It is stressful but the relief when you've done it is immense!

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by madders94)
I revised the research methods part a bit, but not much at all to be honest - I basically just made sure I knew the definitions of the different things (reliability, validity, confounding variables etc) and the issues that might arise (and trust me, this knowledge will help you SO MUCH for PY3, so if you work hard at it now it'll be worth it). There's not much else you can do.

Revision tips.... lots of past papers and lots of practice essays really. It is stressful but the relief when you've done it is immense!

How do actually learn the info/stats etc?

and how many practices for each possible questions ?

[madders94]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
How do actually learn the info/stats etc?

and how many practices for each possible questions ?

Get a little notebook and keep a glossary, an A-Z of all the important terms and what the definition is (because you can pretty much guarantee you'll be asked for the definition of SOMETHING in the exam), and then an example of an issue of it, and just keep looking through it, making sure you know it

Also, anything you're struggling to remember, make posters and put them up everywhere, in your bedroom, all over your house, your car if you have one - stick up as many as you possibly can and just look at them. Record facts to mp3 and fall asleep listening to them. All of these are tried and tested revision methods

As for how many practices... if your teacher is kind, keep bombarding him/her with them until you have an 11/12 mark essay in every combination (there may be a few you can put less effort into because they've come up before, but I can't remember which ones those are), and then just learn them, as much as you can - condense them into bullet points, stick them on flashcards and posters and paper your bedroom in them!

[Miracle Day]

Only done 6 Case Studies so far.. annoying me ffs

[Miracle Day]

(Original post by madders94)
Get a little notebook and keep a glossary, an A-Z of all the important terms and what the definition is (because you can pretty much guarantee you'll be asked for the definition of SOMETHING in the exam), and then an example of an issue of it, and just keep looking through it, making sure you know it

Also, anything you're struggling to remember, make posters and put them up everywhere, in your bedroom, all over your house, your car if you have one - stick up as many as you possibly can and just look at them. Record facts to mp3 and fall asleep listening to them. All of these are tried and tested revision methods

As for how many practices... if your teacher is kind, keep bombarding him/her with them until you have an 11/12 mark essay in every combination (there may be a few you can put less effort into because they've come up before, but I can't remember which ones those are), and then just learn them, as much as you can - condense them into bullet points, stick them on flashcards and posters and paper your bedroom in them!

Can you help me? I don't get the aims and context of Rosenham sane in an insane place

[madders94]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
Can you help me? I don't get the aims and context of Rosenham sane in an insane place

I can't at the moment sorry, got a bad kidney infection and don't know when the next time I'll be on the computer will be, but when I'm back I'll see if I can help

[madders94]

Just to add to my last post I'm currently in hospital, might be out tonight but I'm going to be recovering for a while, sorry x