Evaluation Skills For Exam High Marks

Session 12 Evaluation Skills

Session Plan

Review topics covered in previous session (5 mins)

Discussing the structure of a 16 marker exam question (20 mins)

Reviewing different evaluative tools (30 mins)

Understanding the PEC system (15 mins)

Essay Writing Skills Tips

o Make sure that you read the question properly and understand what it is asking you to do.

Answering a 16 marker:

o AO1 Start off with definitions of key concepts and reference any evidence or relevant studies

o AO2 Relating back to question applying that knowledge, especially if it is a context question that has given you an example.

o AO3 Evaluation What is good about the theory or research? What are the limitations? Important to use the debates e.g. holistic vs. reductionist to evaluate theories, approaches and studies.

A03 questions is where students fail to score high marks, previous examiner reports have commented that:

Students find AO3 skills moredifficult than AO1 skills.

Students score worse on AO3 skills than AO1 skills and are often poor at demonstrating them.

Students tend to write too much on AO1 material and not enough on AO3 material.

How to gain high marks on essay questions?

The main thing is to make sure that you use critical evaluation in the A03 section of your essay. Here are some ways of doing this:

Methodological Evaluation of Research:

Is the theory support by valid research? Then you might say something like X s study supports/refutes this theory...

What are the strengths/limitations of the research methods used? e.g. lab experiment, correlation study, interview

Are there issues with ecological validity, demand characteristics, investigator bias or social desirability bias?

Does the sample used have population validity and can findings be generalised?

o Compare and contrast different theories:
Outline how the theories are similar and how they differ.
E.g. Explain how attachments in humans develop
o Harlow s experiment showed that rhesus monkeys formed attachments to the wire mesh mother that provided comfort.

o Debates or Perspectives :

Debates: Explain the theory/study in relation to the position it takes on issues and debates such as nature vs. nurture, reductionism vs. holism, determinism vs. free will, nomothetic vs. idiographic approaches.
Perspectives: You can also state what approach in psychology the theory/study relates to: biological, behavioural, cognitive, psychodynamic or humanistic.

o Ethical issues of the research

Does a study involve ethical issues such as deception (e.g. Asch), lack of consent (e.g. Milgram), psychological or physical harm (e.g. Zimbardo s Stanford prison experiment or Little Albert case study).

Research conducted on animals may raise issues to do with protection from harm or generalisability to humans (e.g. Harlow s research into attachment).

o Real world applications

What implications does the theory/study have for behaviour in the real world and what uses could it be put to in the real world?

For example, research into the effects of infants response to separation from attachment figures when in hospital changed the way in which hospitals operate parental visiting hours.

o Gender/culture/historical bias -

Theory and research is often criticised for being based on or biased towards males and/or European culture (for example, the psychodynamic approach). Sometimes, research is criticised for being irrelevant to modern society as it was conducted a long time ago when cultural norms were different (e.g. Asch s research into conformity).

Is the theory / study ethnocentric? Psychology is predominantly a white, Euro-American enterprise. In some texts, over 90% of studies have US participants, who are predominantly white and middle class. Does the theory or study being discussed judge other cultures by Western standards?

If research is biased towards men or women it does not provide a clear view of the behavior that has been studied. A dominantly male perspective is known as an androcentric bias.

Struggling to remember? Most Cats Don t Eat Green Rice

END OF EXAMPLE