Psychology

subject overview

Studying Psychology has become a very valuable tool in the world we currently live in with mental health being more acceptable in society and more people wanting to seek help to overcome mental health issues. With much more media material nowadays on mindfulness and improving your mental state readily available, the psychology course has been designed to allow for our young minds to understand treatments available and causes around mental health. Learners will be given opportunities to extend their literacy and numeracy skills by studying research methodology and mathematical testing within this discipline. The scientific status of psychology has now fully been enveloped within the new specification and learners will get to see how it transpires within the real world.

unit overview - taster psychology

Psychology taster overview
Skills	Investigating skills will be required when acquiring new knowledge on what exactly is studied in Psychology. Evaluating and describing skills will be used when introduced to new concepts, studies and research methods. Learners will be asked to debate and discuss psychological issues such as the nature vs nurture debate. Learners will need to be able to write some extended responses. Observational skills when having to analyse certain psychological video clips.
Knowledge	1-Approaches in psychology such as social, cognitive, biological, learning, criminology and sleeping and dreaming. 2- Psychology as a science including: the role of hormones, evolution and flight or fight response 3- Brain development 4-Multi-store model of memory 5-Social influence including obedience 6-Social learning theory on crime 7-Dreams and Freud’s theory on the unconscious mind 8- Research methods such as lab experiments
Rationale	This taster course is designed to allow students to appreciate the scientific status of psychology. Learners will become familiar with the different approaches when studying GCSE and A level psychology. Any misconceptions of what psychology is about will be cleared up such as learners being able to read minds if they choose it. In addition the content chosen will certainly allow learners to see psychology as a science and be able to apply content learnt to their own core lessons in science. The topics chosen are the most interesting and psychological enough to make learners crave wanting to learn more at GCSE level and then move on to A level and of course tertiary level. The topics chosen will form a very solid foundation for studying the actual content at GCSE. Most of all learners should enjoy all aspects of psychology.

knowledge Organiser

A knowledge organiser is an important document that lists the important facts that learners should know by the end of a unit of work. It is important that learners can recall these facts easily, so that when they are answering challenging questions in their assessments and GCSE and A-Level exams, they are not wasting precious time in exams focusing on remembering simple facts, but making complex arguments, and calculations.

We encourage all pupils to use them by doing the following:

Quiz themselves at home, using the read, write, cover, check method.
Practise spelling key vocabulary
Further researching people, events and processes most relevant to the unit.

HHS Psychology KO for taster course