Topic 9: Psychological skills — Edexcel A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Topic 9: Psychological skills with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Topic 9: Psychological skills explained
Synoptic means the paper stops asking what one topic contains and starts asking what psychology as a whole can say about a question.
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The skills paper runs for two hours and carries eighty marks across three parts: a research methods section whose scenario can be set in any area, a review of studies section that can print research you have never met, and an issues and debates section ending in an extended essay. Conceptual issues are matters such as reductionism or whether psychology counts as a science. Methodological issues are matters such as the trade between control in a laboratory task like Baddeley's word lists and realism in field research. Both are argued with evidence drawn from more than one area.
Students will develop an understanding of how to use theories and evidence from many areas of psychology and apply them to the issues.
What is being assessed here is selection rather than recall. A strong answer takes one issue and picks two or three pieces of evidence from different areas that pull in different directions, then says what each shows. On nature and nurture, the twin study by Brendgen and colleagues (2005) separated social from physical aggression and found the physical form more strongly genetic, while Becker and colleagues (2002) found eating attitudes among Fijian schoolgirls changed after television arrived. On reductionism, Raine and colleagues (1997) reported lower glucose metabolism in the prefrontal cortex of murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, an explanation at the level of the brain that says nothing about the situations Milgram manipulated. Theory is used the same way, as a claim evidence can support or embarrass.
Relevant psychological skills have been contextualised in Topics 1–8.
Every method the final paper can ask about was first met inside a content area, which is why revision works best by area and then by skill. Self report, sampling and questionnaire design arrived with social psychology, whose practical gathers interview or questionnaire data. Laboratory experiments, operationalisation and tests of difference arrived with cognitive psychology, whose practical is an experiment analysed with the Mann-Whitney U or Wilcoxon test. Correlation and Spearman's rank arrived with the biological practical, alongside twin and adoption designs. Observation, behavioural categories and inter observer reliability arrived with learning theories. Case studies, interviews and the reliability and validity of diagnosis arrived with clinical psychology.
This topic collects them together in order to ensure that all content has been covered.
Nothing new is introduced at this stage, which cuts both ways: there is no fresh material to learn, and no area is safe from being examined. The practical consequence is that the review of studies section can print research from anywhere on the course, or a summary you have never seen, and ask you to judge its design, sample, ethics and conclusions. Sensible preparation is one sheet per study carrying aim, method, sample, procedure in three steps, results with a single figure, conclusion and two evaluation points, plus the same sheet for each of your own practicals. Generalisability, reliability, application, validity and ethics then give a reusable frame for any study, familiar or not.
Students must consider issues and debates from across all topics in order to develop a general knowledge of key issues and debates.
The board prints its own list, and it repays learning as a list: ethical issues in research including socially sensitive research, practical issues in design and implementation, reductionism, comparisons between ways of explaining behaviour, psychology as a science, cultural and gender issues, the roles of nature and nurture, how understanding has developed over time, the use of psychological knowledge within society, and social control. Each is an argument with two sides, so revise them as positions with evidence already attached. Whether psychology is a science, for example, is supported by the control and replicability of Baddeley's memory experiments and strained by Rosenhan (1973), whose healthy pseudopatients were admitted and diagnosed on the strength of one reported symptom.
Your focus
- This is a synoptic section in which students will be asked to draw on other areas of the qualification in order to understand conceptual and methodological issues.
- Students will develop an understanding of how to use theories and evidence from many areas of psychology and apply them to the issues.
- Relevant psychological skills have been contextualised in Topics 1–8.
Show all 5 objectives
- This topic collects them together in order to ensure that all content has been covered.
- Students must consider issues and debates from across all topics in order to develop a general knowledge of key issues and debates.
Topic 9: Psychological skills exam tips
Examiner Tips
- 💡Build a grid of studies by area, each with method, sample, main finding and two evaluation points, because the synoptic sections reward retrieval from across the whole course.
- 💡Read the question for the issue word first, since the same study can serve reductionism, ethics or cultural bias depending on what is asked.
- 💡Protect time for the extended essay at the end of the paper, as it carries the largest single block of marks on it.
- 💡Spend a minute planning, listing the issue, three studies and the conclusion, because essays lose marks through drift far more often than through missing content.
- 💡Quote a figure only when you are sure of it; a finding described accurately without numbers scores better than a confident wrong number.
- 💡The same handful of studies can be redeployed across several issues, so learn a small set thoroughly rather than a long list badly.
- 💡Methods questions set their scenario in any area, so practise reading an unfamiliar description and naming the design, the variables, the data level and the test in under a minute.
- 💡Show the working, including the number of participants or the degrees of freedom you used to reach a critical value, because that earns credit even when the final decision slips.
- 💡Learn one worked example of each test from your own practical investigations, since your own data are accepted as an illustration.
- 💡Expect at least one question that hands you a study and asks you to assess it, so rehearse evaluating an unseen summary against the clock.
- 💡Use the frame of generalisability, reliability, application, validity and ethics to choose the two points that matter most for that study rather than grinding through all five.
- 💡Write out each named study on a single sheet, because an outline question wants the essentials in order and not everything you know.
- 💡The extended essay names one issue and expects material from more than one area, so rehearse every debate with a pair of studies from different parts of the course.
- 💡Watch the command word, because assess and evaluate want a weighted judgement while analyse wants the argument taken apart into its components.
- 💡Write the conclusion you intend to reach at the top of the plan so that every paragraph points towards it.
Common Mistakes
- Answering a synoptic question from a single area, usually whichever was revised last, which caps the marks available for range and comparison.
- Describing studies at length without turning them into an argument about the issue the question actually names.
- Assuming that only the named classic studies can appear, then having nothing to say when an unfamiliar summary is printed on the paper.
- Writing everything known about two studies and adding a single sentence about the issue at the end, which scores as description.
- Using an approach as if it were evidence, for instance claiming the biological approach proves behaviour is inherited without naming a study that tested it.
- Misreporting findings, such as claiming Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed memory is always wrong, when the mean speed estimates differed by about nine miles per hour across the verbs and only a minority later reported broken glass.
- Reversing the direction of the comparison, which is the commonest error of all, and declaring a result significant because a large Mann-Whitney value exceeded a small critical value.
- Reading the critical value from the wrong row or column by ignoring the number of participants, the degrees of freedom or whether the hypothesis was directional.
- Treating each practical as a separate island, so a question about controlling extraneous variables in a health study is answered as though only cognitive experiments ever need controls.
- Calling a correlation a cause, so a strong positive result from Spearman's rank is written up as one variable producing the other.
- Revising only the areas that appeared on last year's paper, which leaves precisely the gaps a synoptic paper is designed to find.
- Offering evaluation that could have been written without reading the study, such as saying the sample was small when several hundred people took part.
- Confusing reliability with validity, so a point about consistency between two observers is presented as proof that the measure captured what it claimed to capture.
- Learning definitions of the debates but no studies, so the answer describes reductionism without ever reducing an actual behaviour to an actual level of explanation.
- Treating determinism and reductionism as the same idea, when one concerns whether causes are fixed and the other concerns the level at which an explanation is pitched.
- Calling a study unethical without naming the principle breached or what the researcher did about it, such as the debriefing and follow up Milgram carried out.
- Writing about gender bias only as a criticism of male samples, missing beta bias, where differences between men and women are assumed away.