A level Specification and Curriculum Overview

Course followed: AQA Psychology

Course entry requirements

Grade 7 at GCSE in English and a Science (Biology, Chemistry or Physics) or 77 in double award science, as well as grade 6 in Maths.

Course overview

Psychology is defined as the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. Psychologists study how human beings feel, act and think.  They try to find out how we learn, understand, remember and forget things. They are interested in how we make decisions, why we like some people and not others, what makes us succeed and fail.  They study these problems by both observation and experiment, involving both people and animals.  

This A level qualification offers an engaging and effective introduction to Psychology. Students will learn the fundamentals of the subject and develop skills valued by Higher Education (HE) and employers, including critical analysis, independent thinking and research.10% of the overall assessment of Psychology will contain mathematical skills equivalent to Level 2 or above. 25–30% of the overall assessment will assess skills, knowledge and understanding in relation to research methods. These skills will be developed through study of the course content and through ethical practical research activities, involving: designing and conducting research and analyzing and interpreting data. 

The course is taught by subject specialists and lessons develop students’ ability to discuss issues, debate, and carry out independent research into the more complex aspects of the subject. We have a student-led Psychology Society (PsychSoc) which meets to discuss current topics in Psychology and listen to guest lectures.  An optional day trip to a London based conference is held in the Autumn term.

Career Opportunities

Many of our A level Psychology students go on to study the subject at degree level.  Psychology has a wide variety of applications including clinical psychology, educational psychology, counselling, human resources, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, teaching, sports studies, occupational psychology, criminology, careers in the police force and armed services.  A level Psychology fits well with a wide variety of subject combinations, including Biology, Chemistry, English, Geography, History, Politics, P.E., Mathematics, Languages, Business and Economics.

Course Content

The A level course will comprise three papers taken at the end of the two-year course.  All assessment is by written exam and there is no coursework requirement. Each of the three (two hour) A level exams is worth a third of the total A level marks. Each exam comprises multiple choice, short answer and extended essay writing questions. 

Paper 1: Introductory Topics in Psychology

• • Social psychology: why we conform or obey and what causes independent behaviour.

  • Memory: How and why we remember, how and why we forget, factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and the use of the cognitive interview to improve it. 

  • Attachment: How and why we form our earliest relationships, animal studies of attachment, what happens when attachments are disrupted, the influence of early attachments on our later relationships.

  • Psychopathology: definitions of abnormality, understanding phobias, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder; biological, cognitive and behavioural treatments for these disorders.

Paper 2: Psychology in Context 

• • Approaches In Psychology: the basic assumptions of the behaviourist, cognitive, biological psychodynamic and humanistic approaches to understanding human behaviour and personality.

  • Biopsychology: understanding the divisions of the nervous system, the function of the endocrine system, the flight or fight response, the localisation of function in the brain, ways of studying the brain including scanning techniques, biological rhythms and sleep.

  • Research methods: features of science including objectivity and empirical methods and techniques, experimental design, validity and reliability, analysis of quantitative and qualitative data including observations and questionnaires, ethical issues in conducting psychological research, and the use of statistical methods including inferential tests. 

Paper 3: Issues and Options in Psychology 

• • Issues and Debates: Gender and culture in Psychology—universality and bias; free will and determinism—the scientific emphasis on causal explanations; the nature-nurture debate; holism and reductionism; idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation; ethical implications of psychological research including social sensitivity. 

• (option topics-2, 3, 4)

  • Gender: What is the difference between sex and gender? Why do some accept or reject the more traditional male/female divide? What role does biology play in gender? Do we learn gender roles through imitating and modelling others? What role culture and the media have in establishing and maintaining gender roles? 

  • Schizophrenia: classification and diagnosis of schizophrenia, clinical symptoms, biological and psychological explanations, and treatments for the disorder.

  • Aggression: Biological explanations of aggression including neural, hormonal, genetic and evolutionary explanations. Social psychological explanations of aggression including frustration-aggression, social learning theory and individuation. Institutional aggression in prisons. Media influences in aggression.

Equipment and Expenses: A level textbook—approximately £25. Psychology Review Journal-(optional) subscription-12.50 per year. Possible (optional) day trip to conference £ 35.

Helpful Resources

• Borlase Psychology internal website

• Tutor2u

• Simply psychology

Research such as Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s have been criticised for inflicting psychological harm on participants. In Milgram’s study, many ps felt disgusted with themselves because they went up to 450 volts, psychological harm, In Zimbardo’s research the ps playing the guards felt like they could never commit such terrible acts and felt guilt for it. However, it could be argued that the ends justified the means because we have learnt so much about why people obey and conform to social roles. Furthermore, in Milgram’s study, ps were given therapy sessions after and 84% were happy they took part in spite of the ethical issues.

In addition, their research, also including Asch, lacked fully informed consent, so participants didn’t know what they were getting into. However, at the end of Asch’s and Milgram’s studies they were debriefed and were fully informed about the aims of their study and asked for consent to use their results even though they didn’t ask for it in the study. In doing so as aforementioned, the ends justified the means because participants would have guessed the hypothesis and not demonstrated behaviours that were ecologically valid.

In Milgram and Zimbardo’s study, it has been raised that their right to withdraw was not up held because in Milgram’s study, the researcher kept prompting the participants and in Zimbardo, he made it hard for participants to leave the observation. However, it could be said that the ends justify the means because if they fully given the right to withdraw, participants would have dropped out and thus not produce results that have given us great insight into social influence. Overall it can be said that even though Milgram and Zimbardo’s research broke ethical guidelines, there were none when they conducted their studies, so it is unfair to criticise their research based on today’s ethical guidelines.

Mark: 7/8

Commentary: Knowledge of ethical issues is accurate. Discussion is thorough and effective.

The multi store model of memory (MSM) is comprised of three stores; the sensory register, short term memory (STM) store and the long-term memory (LTM) store, which are each connected through cognitive processes including attention and rehearsal. The sensory register takes in all sensory information which stays there for less than a quarter of a second before decaying. However, if an individual pays attention to the information, it will be transferred to the STM. Peterson and Peterson investigated the duration of STM using nonsense syllables. Participants were told to remember a list of nonsense trigrams which would then be recalled after a certain time ranging between 3-18 seconds. In the gap between seeing the trigrams and recalling them, participants were asked to count down from a number in 3s, 4s or 5s, this meant that they would be unable to rehearse the information and prevented its transfer to LTM. Peterson and Peterson found that accurate recall decreased rapidly between 3-18 seconds. The vast majority (90%) were able to recall trigrams after 3 seconds, but very few could recall the trigrams at 18 seconds. Thus they concluded that the duration of STM was up to 18-20 seconds maximum.

It is unlikely that a person would rehearse their friend’s mobile number enough for it to be transferred to LTM thus, once hearing the number, the individual will likely forget it quickly. Moreover, 11 digits is a lot to recall. Jacob’s research found that on average people could recall 9.3 digits. Moreover, Miller’s review of various research concluded that the capacity of STM was 5- 9 chunks of information, thus it is unlikely that something relatively meaningless as someone else’s phone number would be remembered. PIN codes are only 4 digits however and so can comfortably fit into STM. As PINs are very important numbers, valuable to individuals they would take it upon themselves to rehearse it and to allow for its transfer to the LTM. Moreover, it is important to note the importance of a PIN.

A major criticism of research into memory is the lack of environmental validity. Studies are often very artificial and so it can be argued that the data is not representative of real life; participants will likely be bored and uninspired by the things they are tested on. Thus they are less willing to commit things to memory. Therefore many psychologists have suggested that psychological research into memory in fact underestimates our abilities. Thus we can safely conclude that an individual’s PIN will be stored easily in LTM.

Psychologists have supported the idea of things having more meaning are more easily remembered. By giving information a meaning it becomes more semantic and personal to the individual. Semantic memories are encoded and thus stored by the LTM. Baddeley studied the encoding methods in STM| and LTM. Participants were given a list of 10 words such as big, hot, wet which included synonyms e.g. large and words that were acoustically similar such as wig. In  condition 1, participants were asked to recall the words in order immediately, thus testing STM. In condition 2 they were asked to recall the words in order after 20 minutes, thus testing the LTM. In condition 1, participants had more difficulty recalling acoustically similar words, suggesting that information is encoded acoustically in STM. In condition 2, participants had difficult recalling the semantically similar words thus suggesting that the LTM encodes information semantically. Once the individual’s PIN has made it to LTM it will potentially stay there forever. Research by Bahrick et al suggests that the duration of LTM is potentially unlimited, any apparent forgetting is in fact due to retrieval failure or a lack of cues. His research involved former classmates naming each other from a class photo. After 3 years of leaving school, individuals could easily recognise each other and put a name to a face. After 48 years recognition was around 40%, but with relative cues, recall improved, thus suggesting that the duration is potentially unlimited. Therefore PIN codes can easily be recalled compared to phone numbers.

However, the multi store model appears to provide a clear and easy definition and diagram to explain how memory works. Critics accuse this of being too simplistic, a reductionist approach to explain the complicated functions in the brain. The suggestion that memory is just three stores has been undermined by brain scans and case studies including the likes of HM and KF. HM had brain surgery to relieve his epilepsy symptoms, yet this left him with severe brain damage. He was unable to form new long-term memories. However, this should be expanded to explain that he was able to form new procedural long-term memories (those memories about how we do things), but he was unable to make new semantic or episodic memories (those memories of events, facts and how things work). In a similar way brain scans have shown that different brain areas are associated with different types of LTM, thus it cannot be one store. In addition patient KF was able to store visual information in his STM but not verbal information, suggesting that there are multiple STM stores. Such research undermines the basic principles of the multi-store model of memory which led to Baddeley and Hitch developing the Working Model of Memory in an attempt to address the issues of the Multi-store model.

Mark: 16/16

Commentary: Excellent answer. Knowledge of MSM is accurate and detailed, application is effective, discussion is thorough and effective.