AQA A2 Psychology PSYA3/PSYA4 Revision Thread 2016

Guys i havent gone over biological therapies to depression as much just hoping it doesnt come up!! i want bio explanations to come up sooo bad and also im worried about research methods not done much revision for it :/

did more people sit the revised papers or the original papers?

Don't do it in a table, i don't understand why you would honestly. But you should use headings to separate things so its easy to make sure you remember everything, especially if the question specifically asks for certain things (e.g. sample, hypothesis, procedure)

Plss what are the titles ? I need help. My teacher has confused me

this is how my teacher showed us how to do it:

separate it into 4 sections - participants, design, material and procedure. as in, literally write out your answer with these headings, maybe underline them as titles, it'll help with structure!

under participants, write about your sample and how you will go about choosing them (e.g. volunteer) and why. if the question hints at the demographic you should use, go for it, but in most answers it's up to you to pick how many participants you're actually going to have etc.

under design, write your hypothesis (and whether it's directional etc), the independent and dependent variables in your study, what type of experiment it is going to be, or whether it's a correlational study, and maybe explain some measures you will take to try and cancel out extraneous variables etc. always justify!

under materials, you don't have to put much. e.g. if you're analysing kids' behaviour on a playground, you may need a video camera to record and analyse later, a content analysis sheet, and coloured bibs so you can differentiate your participants from the other children

and procedure is when you go through how many days the experiment will take place, the exact steps involved in your experiment (including ethical stuff, consent etc, and then the actual study), how the data is collected, whether you're using multiple observers at a time to increase inter-rater reliability, things like that. end it with a debriefing remember! if you have time, also go through how you will plot your results, and maybe even go through which statistical test you need to see if your results are significant.

remember they literally want you to act like a psychologist, so consider and explain/justify everything u can remember!! and if we get a 10 marker like this don't worry, we're meant to spent 50 minutes on research methods overall. we should have tons of time to do a really detailed answer for that type of question. idk how other schools/teachers have shown people, but that's how i've been taught!! hope it helped. if you can find any model answers online, have a look! if not i can post some of mine here, i've never gotten full marks lol but usually around 8/10 x

revised i think. they didnt want people to do the stolen one because they could have cheated

heres a really good post from someone else earlier

Can you use IDA's for AO2 in PSYA4???
Anybody know?

you can use them for ao2 but it's not required like in psya3

what do you include if you're asked to design an observational study? Is it just hypothesis, apparatus and procedure?
What does "appropriate method of investigation" refer to??

But I will get properly marked for them the same as I would for PSYA3?

Cheers btw

Thank you so much , you are a star ! Pls post 1 if that is convenient for you

i think an appropriate method of investigation would be to choose an appropriate way of observing? so like overt or covert, who will be observed/how will the observation take place, that kind of thing.

when in doubt, put in as much as possible. you can never be too detailed in that bit.