Psychology book club

Everyone is invited to the first meeting of our Psychology book club

R23, Monday 17th September at 1.30 pm

We will be reading 'As nature made him' by John Colapinto. Copies are limited so will  be shared within pairs. It is out of print but there are a number of used copies on Amazon. The following meeting will be 15th October where we will meet to discuss the book and introduce the next.

Social Influences on Gender Role

Here is the presentation for this lesson.

In addition to using studies (aim for four to six) to comment on (support or otherwise) the theory, you should offer some general evaluation of the Social Learning approach. There are some prompt questions on the last-but-one slide on the presentation - here is some help with the answers:

'Adevelopmental' means that a theory ignores the fact that children change as they develop. Learning Theory in general assumes that learning occurs in the same way at all ages - this may well not be true as children's ideas about gender change significantly between the ages of two and seven.

'Empirical testing' means using controlled experiments with objective results to test a theory. These ideas can be easily tested in naturalistic or laboratory observations - the predictions of the theories and the results of the study are clear. However focusing on one element of gender-related learning in an artificial environment may mean that research is too low in ecological validity. Aim to write a separate paragraph dealing with these 'methodological issues'.

It's hard to argue against parents, peers, the media and schools being important in the shaping of gender behaviour, but children may be more active in seeking out this information than the Learning Theory approach suggests. The main alternatives are the biological explanation (which states that boys and girls are different anyway, so we treat them differently) and the cognitive developmental approach (which doesn't really disagree with social learning, but which emphasis the active role and development of the child much more).


A homework essay for Monday:
Discuss research relating to the impact of parents, peers, schools and the media on gender development. 8 + 16 marks

Next lesson:
Describe and evaluate the social learning explanation of gender development. 4 + 8 marks (in 20 minutes)

Social influence on Gender - studies

Here is the presentation from this lesson.

¡Litton and Romney (1991) – Meta-analysis of parental treatment of boys and girls aged 6 found girls more encouraged to do household chores, boys outdoor tasks.

¡Seagel (1987) – fathers more likely to react negatively when sons carried out feminine behaviour.

¡Smith and Lloyd (1978) – babies in unisex snow-suits given different names are treated differently by carers (reinforcement of play etc).

¡Fagot (1985) – boys more likely to be criticised by peers for feminine activities.

¡Morgan (1982) – more TV correlates with stronger sex-typed identity.

¡Fagot et al (1982) – parents how show the clearest patterns of differential reinforcement have children who are quickest to develop strong gender preferences.

For each of these track it down in a textbook or online (search by name and date and you should be able to find all of them) and add some more detail to the brief outline of method and findings here. For our next lesson, whenever that may be!

The Evolutionary Approach - holiday work for Mr Lawrence

Answer the following questions, either in the form of a single essay, short answers or a presentation, in time for our first lesson in September.

• What are the assumptions made by the evolutionary approach to psychology?
• What did Clark and Hatfield (1989) find out about casual sex?
• How does the evolutionary approach explain these findings?
• Why is the approach so controversial?

Statistics - The Third Kind of Lie

On Thursday we will have a Unit 4 Exam-style test on the statistics work we have been doing this term. Here is what you need to be able to do:

• How to tell if data is ordinal or nominal.
• What means, medians, modes, ranges and standard deviations are and what they show.
• What independent groups, repeated measures and matched pairs designs are.
• How to choose and justify the choice of a statistical test for a set of data.
• What a level of significance is and how to justify a choice of the 5% level.
• How to decide whether a result is significant using a statistical table.
• How to state the result of a statistical test.

Here is the flow-chart for choosing a statistical test - stating the decisions you make when working through this is what 'justifying your choice of test' means.

Here are the instructions for the write-up of the 'finger-tapping' experiment we did, and here is the data. I want to take this work in on Thursday.

More practice statistics problems:
Four more tests to do.
Significant or not significant?

Unit 2 Revision Map

http://popplet.com/app/#/24311

I've made mind maps for the Unit 2 topics which I've taught, attempting to clarify what I recommend you focus your revision on. If you're aiming for an A or B grade you will need a bit more detail than is here, e.g. brief details of some additional research which you can find in your textbook which will be useful for evaluation in your longer answers.

Popplet is a fairly new website for mind mapping - it's in beta development meaning that the programming isn't quite finished and they're looking for feedback on how it works, but it's really easy to use and might make this kind of revising painless if you don't enjoy doing it on paper. Give it a try (e.g. by making a detailed mind-map for one topic e.g. 'independent behaviour' or 'stress management').

Exam preparation

Here is a powerpoint from AQA that contains lots useful guidance on how to approach the exam. One useful point is that you must clearly label any work that is outside of the allocated space for your answer.
Take this slide for example - the candidate has not indicated that the answer is continued so the marker has no reason to believe the answer is continued:

BUT see this next picture:

It's REALLY important that you indicate that you have gone onto extra pages or have continued elsewhere. The papers are scanned and then marked online so the examiner doesn't have a paper copy of your paper in front of them.