A-Level Psychology AQA

Hey, so i read over your paragraph , also a A-level psychology student here.
Is this paragraph meant to be together because you outlined 2 different points ? ( a weakness and a strength )
I would say that there are irrelevant pieces of information that are not needed such as " on July 16th and emerged on September 17th, thinking it was actually August 20th." because psychology it so content heavy no need to memorise pointless information unless you wanna show off to the examiners then you go !!
Also the sentence that begins ' This suggests' i would say change it to therefore this demonstrates because you wanna follow a PEEL structure ( point, evidence, explanation and link ) to show the examiner that your really evaluating and you have the ability to stay on track and discuss one point at a time.
Also for your weakness if you talk about validity then you can almost always talk about reliability, so you can add if you want that because the studies results are not generalisable to the wider population then it definitely cant be a reliable set of data.

Hope this was useful and good luck !

Yeah, thanks this was really nice and deailed! I'm sorry, I didn't really have a teacher who helped me to write one of these properly, which really made this a useful insight! Thank you!

Hi!

Would someone be willing to have a quick read-through my AO3 paragraph for circadian rhythms. Its just one paragraph and I'm not sure if it's a valid point to use in any essays. I'd appreciate any feedback and constructive criticism !

A strength of circadian rhythms and its existence is there is research support from Siffre, a French cave explorer. Siffre showed that we have a free-running circadian rhythm (i.e., the activity of a cycle/rhythm without any external cues). Siffre went into a cave, isolated from any external cues, on July 16th and emerged on September 17th, thinking it was actually August 20th. His circadian rhythms has settled to just over 24 hours. This suggest that even in the absence of external cues like natural light and clocks, Siffre’s internal biological rhythms kept around a 24 hour cycle of sleep and waking, showing that the body had internal biological clocks that determines when we wake and sleep, aided along with environmental cues. However, a limitation of Siffre’s study was that it was a case study unique only to Siffre and his experiences, and as such, it cannot be generalised to the entire population, thus limiting its validity as evidence for free-running circadian rhythms. Therefore, while Siffre’s experiment provided the existence of circadian rhythms, it is limited its value as evidence as it cannot be reliably generalised to the wider population.

Thank you!

Hey - I did a level psych last year and got an A* and tutor it now so had a read through this. There's definitely some really good parts. I agree with what the other user commented - had a couple of other bits to add as well.
1. Definitely split these into two points - the strength, then the limitation
2. Your knowledge of the study is great, but has way too much detail for an AO3 point! This detail should be going in the AO1 section, and the AO3 should be kept strictly to truly evaluating what the AO1 means.
3. You need to develop your answers a little more. Think about using the P E E L structure: Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link. So you've got your Point with saying there is a strength because there is research support You've got your Evidence by saying for example, Siffre's cave study was a detailed circadian rhythm study that developed understanding. You then need to go into either WHY that evidence is supporting your point, or WHAT the study showed which is helpful to your point.
E.g. A strength of circadian rhythms is that there is a strong evidence base to rely upon for evidence. A key example of this is Siffre's cave study, which has been very influential in learning about circadian rhythms. Siffre's study helped to demonstrate clearly that there was a key internal biological clock which determines how our sleep/wake cycle functions, which is important in developing our further understanding of how circadian rhythms function. It also gave us a key insight into how our internal biological clocks function in situations where exogenous zeitgebers are not playing as big a role, as this helps with understanding the impact that each different system may have. For this reason, we can see that the extensive research support highlights a strength of the circadian rhythms explanation.

Please shout if you have any other questions! Well done and keep going with it - you're doing great with it, its just fine tuning