AQA Psychology for GCSE: Student Book

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This book is extremely useful to students taking the new AQA specification. The layout and presentation of the book is stunning: each chapter is explicitly linked to the specification in the form of logical learning objectives. The book summarises the content in a user-friendly manner for students while providing an interesting range of discussion points and depth of content for high achieving students. This book provides a series of ‘building skills’ activities designed to help the students apply their knowledge while carrying out a range of interesting and related practical experiments. After some trials, the actual experiment was conducted but this time with two policeman dolls with the child tasked with placing the boy doll in such a way that neither police doll could see it. The experiment was conducted three times so that a different section of the grid was left as the only hiding place each time. We've created a detailed study guide on how GCSE psychology students can study for the subject here. For example, children may be encouraged to play with water and discover for themselves which objects float and sink. Children may also be given science problems to solve either on their own or in a group to allow them to learn from their experiences. Teachers can also look to present opportunities for children to learn new concepts only when they are at the right stage of intellectual development and ready to learn. Children may be provided with materials and taught in a child-centred way where they discover answers for themselves. Piaget's Four Stages of Development With all the uncertainly that the new GCSE specifications are bringing, this book will be a very useful tool in any GCSE Psychology teacher's toolkit. It directly follows the new AQA specification in a logical and well thought-out format. The clear layout and format will be a hit with both students and teachers alike. It really is a dual purpose textbook, a starting point for teachers preparing materials for their lessons and a student resource book too.

Our AQA Psychology Textbooks for GCSE have been designed with students and teachers in mind and are ultimate study tools for mastering the subject and achieving success in exams! The brain stem is shaped like a widening stalk and connects the spinal cord to the brain. It controls basic autonomic functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and sleeping. At the sixth week of pregnancy, the baby’s heart is beating regularly and blood pumps through the main vessels.Identical twins may have twins that appear to have similar characteristics and it can be easily thought to be down to nature but this may not be the case. Despite these criticisms, Piaget’s theory has enjoyed a lot of mainstream support. His experiments were easy to replicate and his research had a major impact on early years education where his ideas are still used to this day.

Dave Berry is an experienced psychology teacher and examiner. He regularly leads face-to-face and online training courses for a major awarding body. Dave teaches psychology at Bolton School, Lancashire. A students ability to store the information is ultimately more important than how they learn this information. Willingham believed that students should be taught using the best method based on the content they were being taught. Many potential students often ask "is psychology a hard GCSE subject?". The tutorial above will hopefully answer this question but in short, the answer is no, GCSE psychology is not a particularly hard subject to learn provided you revise sufficiently and learn the key theories and how to evaluate them.Willingham disagreed with this and believed that learning styles do not exist in the ways suggested. As part of his learning theory, he pointed out that there was no experimental support for their existence or effectiveness. Other research studies have also shown that teaching in a students preferred learning style has no effect on their exam results. Study design: A laboratory setting was used where there was control over some of the extraneous variables. All procedures were standardised to ensure replicability and reliability of findings. Eighty (80) children between the ages of 4yrs and 6yrs old took part in the study.

This textbook provides an excellent balance of information, application and evaluation that will allow students and teachers to access the course content, while still accessing those top grades. I would definitely recommend this textbook to anyone studying psychology and in my opinion it is a must have to achieve the highest possible grades. Mark Jones is Head of A Level Psychology at a large and successful FE college in Bristol. Mark has many years' examining experience and has also worked as an advanced practitioner, liaising with teachers and colleges to help improve performance. In response to his theory nurseries and primary schools place a heavy focus on discovery-based learning where children are given a variety of objects and allowed to explore them in their own way. The layout is very student friendly and the activities and suggestions for further reading will really consolidate a student's knowledge and ensure they are well prepared for the examination. It is written with students in mind and the language and layout are very student friendly.... Piaget’s cognitive development theory and its stages have been heavily criticised. Other psychologists have shown that the ages Piaget said children could learn certain tasks we're incorrect. More recent studies have shown how babies develop object permanence before eight months (Hughes “Policeman Doll” study 1978) and children can lose their egocentric thinking and conserve before the age of seven (McGarrigle and Donaldson’s Naughty Teddy study 1974). There is also now the belief that children enter the formal operational stage much later than age 11, and some never reach this stage at all.Willingham agreed that visual and auditory memory may be better within students but this did not help in the classroom environment. Willingham argued this was because teachers want students to learn the meaning of things rather than what they sound or look like. Regardless of whether the information was presented visually, actively or audibly, the student still needed to extract the information and its meaning to effectively learn. This would then explain why teaching in a students preferred learning style appears to have no effect on their exam results. Animal studies also have their limitations as we have to be careful when we draw conclusions on human development based on the findings of animal-based studies. This is because what applies to animals may not necessarily generalise to humans because human development is very complex and could be different. Results: 90% of the children aged between 3.5yrs and 5yrs were able to hide the boy doll from the two policeman dolls.

Cara Flanagan is one of the best-known and most respected authors for A Level Psychology. A practised teacher with examining experience and a well-known conference presenter, Cara is renowned for creating resources that students love to use. There is also criticism of the way Piaget collected his data. Small samples were used and a lot of research was done using his own children. Some argue small samples may be unrepresentative of most children and the questions he asked children were not standardised as each child was treated differently. Therefore the way in which the questions were asked could be a confounding variable for the results. Ruth Jones is a practised teacher with examining experience and is Head of Psychology at a school ranked 'outstanding' by Ofsted in its last two inspections. Ruth also has a Masters Degree in Education. Other criticisms of Piaget’s theory focuses on how he conducted his experiments. For example, in the conservation tasks, he asked children the same question more than once before and after the counters had been moved. This could have resulted in researcher bias as the children may have believed that their first answer may be incorrect and so changed this.

Identical twins may be treated similarly by people such as parents or peers and therefore their behavioural similarities may be due to nurture (and being treated the same) rather than their genes. Our experienced educators and subject experts have carefully crafted the content to ensure that it is accessible and easy to understand, without sacrificing depth or accuracy. With summaries, explanations of key terms and exam-style questions at the end, our textbook is the perfect resource for both classroom learning, teaching and independent study. Some research studies have shown that IQ between identical twins is very similar which implies nature plays a significant role in intelligence. Other research studies have found personality is also shaped by nature; one study compared the behaviours of identical twins who were raised apart. Jean Piaget believed that a child’s intelligence developed from them discovering things for themselves and they needed to explore objects and situations to learn about them. Piaget also believed that children needed to be ready to learn and that they could only gain new concepts and understanding if they were at the right stage of their development as predicted by his stage theory of cognitive development.