Napkins

Unfortunately I’ve had to turn off Comments on this blog to stop the abundance of spam that is landing in my inbox.

Initially it was only one or two posts that seemed to attracting the stuff, so I left commenting on for all others. However, now it has spread to other posts, so I’m afraid that’s the end of any interactivity on this blog.

I will still post as and when I can and hope that what I post is useful to some people who dont want to sell drugs or pornography!

Quite a few of my students were feeling a little bit down following their results arriving on Thursday. We decided to have a go at sitting the biggest of the 2 OCR AS modules - Core Studies. Even with my assurance that it didn’t matter what they got and should treat it as practice many were surprised at how badly they did. I’m not surprised and also quite pleased that they didn’t do fantastically, not because they don’t deserve to succeed. They do. However, the practice of exam questions is what was lacking and these results perhaps brought this home to them a little more loudly than I’ve managed to.

Sometimes being a teacher feels a lot like being a nagging parent: tidy your room, put your clothes away, do your homework; in this case the demands are more like “read the studies, test your knowledge, complete practice questions”. Fortunately students are (in my experience) considerably easier to persuade than our own children, in that when the evidence is staring them in the face they usually admit that you were right. Eventually.

So, apart from not completing enough exam practice, where did my students go wrong?

There’s a few separate points here, so I’ll cover them one at a time:

1. Run Away! Run Away!

Exams are quite a stressful experience and as psychologists we know that when stress attacks we are running on more primal instincts, namely fight or flight. In exams this comes in the form of starting writing immediately and at speed and exiting the exam room as quickly as you possibly can without causing an accident.

One way in which health practitioners treat stress is a treatment called stress inoculation therapy, whereby the ‘patient’ faces the cause of their stress in small doses and gradually develops coping strategies in much the same way that a flu jab provides a mild, inactive form of the influenza virus, allowing natural anti-bodies to accrue and fight off the virus for real.

Completing practice questions is exactly the same process, helping us to become familiar with the types of questions and the situation. As the exam date approaches these questions can be completed in exam conditions so that the real thing is no longer a strange and frightening event and is much less likely to cause a stress response.

2. Knowing What To Expect

The first time I travelled by plane I wasn’t exactly terrified, but I was a little bit worried about everything. What happened if I was delayed on the way to the airport? Would my suitcase be too heavy? Where do I check in? Is it normal for the plane to dip and shudder like that? Fortunately I was with someone who had flown before and was reassured by their knowledge. I arrived at my destination with all my luggage (it wasn’t too heavy) and none the worse for the minor turbulence we had encountered along the way. However I felt much more confident on the return flight mostly because I had experienced it for myself.

Regardless of what type of learner you come out as on a VAK questionnaire the reality is that most of what we learn we learn by doing: brushing our teeth, writing our name, driving a car. All of these activities become easier the more we do them, to the extent that they almost become autonomic behaviours.

Therefore, however much I tell my students what they should expect and what to do, until they experience the exam for real they will not fully appreciate the truth of what I am saying.

Avoiding results disappointment is as simple as practicing responses to questions over and over again without the bad experience. This is even better if your tutor is happy to mark your responses so you can see the progress you are making.

3. Interpreting Questions

We all used to read books. Now we go online in our spare time. Most older people will tell you that this is the reality and to some extent it is the truth. Young people are much less likely to choose reading as a leisure activity and are more likely to see it as something they are forced to do as part of their education.

A very real consequence of not enjoying reading is that our vocabularies do not grow and also don’t get the chance for rehearsal, so new words that we have learned are forgotten. Then we come across an exam question written in complicated English and big words and we freak out (see point 1!)

Exam papers are not very interesting to read and certainly not a substitute for a good book, but the more you read them the better you become at understanding what the questions are asking. Without that understanding it is pretty unlikely that you can give the right answer.

Once again the point is simple - practice questions before the exam, even if that practice is just reading the questions and thinking about what you would write. Your understanding will be far better in this less pressurised situation and will grow stronger the more you do it (like Harry Potter’s Patronus ).

4. What Do Points Make?

One of my students noticed I had the Times Tables on my wall the other day - they’ve been there since September and she wondered why, considering the class are all 16+ years old. Why? Because along with not reading we don’t do the Times Table chant any more and it’s not a good thing, especially when it comes to answering exam questions.

It isn’t quite enough to know that you have understood the question and memorised the right information to give an answer. Each question is worth a number of marks and like it’s harder to answer the One Million Dollar / Pound question on Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire, it’s going to take a bit more effort to get the answer right for a question worth 10 marks than if it’s only worth 2.

The maths involved in working out how much to write is pretty straightforward, but with practice you will eventually look at the number of marks and understand what is expected.

For example, any question worth a number of marks divisible by 3 (3, 6, 9, 12 etc.) is going to require a PEC / PEE approach for each set of 3 marks.

Thats…

POINT
EXAMPLE
EXPLAIN / COMMENT

12 marks means doing this 4 times (4×3=12) and usually the examiners will have helped you with the working out by asking for “two strengths and two weaknesses” or something like that.

Even when a question is worth 2 marks this means you need to say a couple of things to get both of those marks.

To add one final game show cliche - you get nothing at all for two in a bed, or along those lines - you can only get credit once for saying something, so reading ahead of answering is handy for making sure you have an answer for every part of a question.

5. Time To Think

It takes a lot of self discipline to go into the exam room and sit calmly, ignoring the other people who told you on the way in how they are going to fail, then open the paper and read it for a few minutes, carefully thinking about what you might answer for each of the questions. But that is exactly what is needed - that plus reading the instructions before you even start looking at the questions.

As we all seem to be programmed to ignore words in bold (how many of the 5 titles did you notice as you read this page?) the only way to make yourself read the instructions in bold on the front of the exam paper and at the top of each page is to continually remind yourself that you must. If you are given a choice of questions to answer then the examiner will mark whichever of these you answer first, regardless of your failure to read the instruction that said “Answer one of the questions below”.

It is very tempting to leap into answering the questions without thinking (there’s no time to think, you’re saying) and the trigger response to seeing a key word in the question is to vomit all of your knowledge onto the page regardless of whether it answers the question. However, no exam question will ever ask you to “Write everything you know about X”.

Needless to say, the more practice papers you do the clearer it will be in your mind exactly what you are supposed to do in a particular exam.

My Point?

My point, if you haven’t realised by now, is that practice makes perfect. The more you do something the better you become at it. Still, it’s also worth remembering that in the grand scheme of things it’s just an exam and whilst succeeding might be quite important the world won’t stop spinning if you don’t.

Toddlers fall over a lot, but (as someone said to me recently) we never look at them and say “Ooh, he’s not a walker”.

Ultimately what is important is that you give it your best shot and keep on trying…

And keep practicing those exam questions!

Thanks to one of my colleagues at the OU for telling the story of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ as part of our day school session. This is a great story by Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt and a useful study that is probably sufficiently empirical to use in A2 Psychology. It’s particularly pertinent to Crime (OCR module 2549) and The Environment (OCR module 2547).

In short, Paul Feldman, economist turned bagel man delivered bagels to offices of varying sizes over a number of years and collected payment for the bagels via an honesty box. He kept rigorous data and, being an economist, analysed the data for relationships and correlations.

The data reveals some interesting ‘facts’, not least of all that people are essentially honest (89% of the time on average). There are also some fluctuations in honesty rate related the state of the economy, the weather, ‘911′, the individual’s status in the company, the size of the company etc., all of which offer the opportunity for comparisons to other research that we cover as part of the A2 course. This is of course a godsend for those synoptic questions and provides some much needed insight into ‘white collar crime’.

The story is part of the book ‘Freakonomics’ (details below) and I am told it’s a very good read.

A PDF of ‘What the Bagel Man Saw’ is available here:
http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~bmayes/pdf/Bagel%20Man.pdf.

Levitt, S.D. and Dubner, S.J. (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything William Morrow.

This is an excellent article describing Joseph Dimow’s experience as one of Milgram’s participants.

The article, published in Jewish Currents in 2004, describes how he felt taking part, his suspicions about what was taking place and how his own upbringing and experiences may have contributed to his refusal to obey.

Read Article

Dare I say, the website re-design is almost done, give or take the odd javascript problem.

I’m hoping that by the beginning of next week I can send out an email to all the previously registered tutors to ask them to have a play around and see if there is anything they can break.

There are quite a few improvements and changes to the site, although the principles behind it are still the same: to provide OCR A Level Psychology students and tutors with the opportunity to complete practice exam questions online with peer or tutor assessment.

The Big Changes

• Tutors can add practice questions for other examining bodies at any level.
• Members can create their own profile pages and add friends from other schools.
• Students can sign up independently of a tutor and ‘go solo’ if they wish, or pester their tutor into signing up too.
• There is a fully functioning suite of Virtual Classrooms (chat), with the possibility for members to add their own rooms.
• Tutors can generate automatic reports on students’ progress (or they will be able to by next week!).

There are a few other new features too, then lots of changes to do with layout, colour and making the site W3C / DDA compliant.

The temporary address for the re-design is www.social-science.co.uk/2008 - some things may not work as expected but feel free to play around.

The Virgin Mary toast that sold for 28000 USD on eBay

… Or rather what you don’t.

It’s no surprise, given that the brain is designed to seek out familiar things. However, sometimes the ability to see something that isn’t really there is quite intriguing and just a little bit daft.

In the same way as every newly alighted train passenger is the friend you are waiting for, it stands to reason that other things that are important to us will influence our visual perception; like perceiving faces in the clouds for example, only that’s still not weird enough.

The BBC News site has offered a number of articles describing the mysterious appearance of deities in foodstuffs, most recently the Arabic name for God and the name of Mohammed on a piece of beef in Nigeria.

There’s plenty more where that came from, including Jesus on a chapati and the Mother Teresa cinnamon bun that was stolen.

It’s pretty obvious there are psychological reasons behind these apparently mystical events, not that any are mentioned in the articles themselves (links below). This is rather useful if you’re looking for a decent assignment source, as it’s not just Virgin Mary Toast stories which lend themselves to a good psychological bashing.

The key is to have a good read around the various news and newspaper sites and if you find yourself thinking ‘I know exactly why that happened’ then you may well have struck assignment gold.

Don’t forget articles need to be less than two years old - some of those listed below are not.

BBC ‘Holy Food’ Articles:
‘Allah meat’ astounds Nigerians
India marvels at ‘miracle chapati’
Christmas thief steals ‘Nun Bun’
Woman ‘blessed by the holy toast’
Message from Allah ‘in tomato’
Caravan park ‘Christ’ draws the faithful
Tropical fish ‘has Allah marking’

Interesting Thing Of The Day is a great blog, which, strangely enough is quite interesting but also, on this occasion, relevant to psychologists. The link below is to a post chronicling to the life of Phineas Gage, who suffered a severe, personality changing head injury.

Read The Story of Phineas Gage on Interesting Thing Of The Day.

Now, by this I don’t actually mean ‘rambling’ in the sense of romping through the countryside in woolly socks, shoes that are midway between boots and trainers and ‘britches’. I don’t even know what ‘britches’ are, nor do I own a kagoul, let alone the whole myriad of kagouls I’m sure are required to be an official amateur rambler. And then there’s the much greater problem of my absolute and terminal inability to navigate - maps are only slightly more impossible to read than they are to fold.

As the paragraph above illustrates more than adequately, I do know how to ramble - that tremendously useful skill of going on about nothing at all and in no particular order. Indeed if these things gained qualifications I could probably achieve an A* with very little effort at all. However, like all writing projects (blogs, essays, exams and so on), one has to start somewhere and in fact that is often the biggest challenge.

Staring at the blank screen / page / answer booklet can bring on a terrible sense of foreboding. There’s that feeling of dread that in an hour’s time, when the invigilator says ‘put down your pens please’, the page will still be as pristine as it was at the beginning, give or take the odd dot where you accidentally lost a grip of your pen, shortly before you lost a grip of your mind.

Marvellously, this is an entirely avoidable situation, because we all know how to ramble. It doesn’t even matter what we write either, not initially. If it’s an electronic document of some form we can go back and delete whatever waffle we began with - it might even be good enough to be spared the mighty chop, needing instead only a little editing to turn it into an introduction of beauty and worth.

In exams our delete button comes in the form of permission to cross stuff out. Examiners don’t generally look at the bits with lines through them, so the ‘wibble wibble wibble’ at the start won’t matter. Obviously we have to put the preciousness we afford presentation to one side to write something we know we may very well cross out later, but it doesn’t matter. The page is no longer blank and this in itself is a significant achievement.

If you’re doubting this is true, then try it. Start a new Psylent blog (or a new post if you’ve already signed up) right now, when you have nothing to say, then just type something, anything. The only rule I’d recommend is that you use real words and real sentences, but the content and meaning are not that important. You don’t even have to save it or publish it (although the random ramblings of psychology teachers and students en masse would be a Freudian paradise to read).

So, it would seem that my first post on Psylent is about exam tips, in a roundabout way. As with all exam tips, they work for some people and we should all try everything once. Well, everything except sky-diving without a parachute.

Comments are welcome - perhaps people would like to share their exam tips?