March 2024 Psychology subject update

Working as an examiner, or Assessment Associate, is the best way to develop your understanding of the requirements of exam questions, which can in turn be a huge asset in terms of preparing students for future exams. With experience of examining comes opportunities to apply for senior positions such as Principle Examiner among others.

We currently have vacancies for each of our psychology courses, and you can find out more and apply online via the links below. If you run into any difficulties with the application system, please do contact me at teachingpsychology@pearson.com and I can put you in touch with our Assessment Leader for psychology who oversees examiner recruitment.

There are also vacancies for trainers for International A Level psychology, and for GCSE psychology for international centres, and you will find information on these at the bottom of the vacancies list linked below.

Applications will be open year-round but please apply by mid-April if you would like to examine for the summer 2024 series.

On 2 February the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) published their updated guidance on AI use in assessments.

The guidance is designed to help students and teachers to complete NEAs, coursework and other internal assessments successfully, giving students the chance to demonstrate skills which cannot be assessed in exams.

Please do share the latest version of the guidance with senior leaders, teachers and assessors in your school or college. It’s vital the guidance informs school policies on AI use, and schools and colleges provide staff and students with clear information.

A summary of the key updates is available on the JCQ website. They've also produced a poster for students on the use of AI and assessments and an information sheet for teachers along with PowerPoint presentations for teachers and students.

Read all the information on JCQ blog and download the updated guidance and support materials.

• JCQ blog with full details and all links
• Updated JCQ guidance

As part of our work on a future A Level psychology specification we have recently begun to investigate both the potential for AI to support teachers in the time consuming but important work of giving students feedback on their written work, and making our next A Level exams available as either on-screen assessments or traditional paper-based exams.

In trials run by UK universities AI tools have been found to be impressively accurate in judging the quality of essays. We are currently investigating how an online platform could be used by psychology teachers to set extended response questions for their students to type responses to. The idea is that the AI could suggest a level / mark and constructive feedback comments for the teacher to review before sharing with students. 

This project is in its early stages, but we are keen to gather the views of teachers and gauge interest. The form below should take no more than three minutes to complete and you can leave your contact details if you would be interested in taking part in a trial or discussing this idea further.

• Complete our on-screen assessment and AI-assisted marking survey form

If you haven't visited it recently, we recommend taking a look at the Teachers' Toolkit on the BPS website, where you will find some really good free resources for use in the classroom.

In particular the 'careers' section may be of interest if you have Year 12 students looking into options beyond their A Levels.

• Visit the BPS Teachers' Toolkit page

We received some very useful feedback when we shared this survey form last month - here it is again in case you haven't yet had a chance to share your ideas.

Last summer we consulted with A Level Psychology teachers regarding improvements to the assessment experience for students. We are continuing to listen to your feedback and to work on planned improvements, but we are also looking ahead now to a significant re-development of the specification. There is no definite date for this as yet, and the current specification will definitely be available for the next two cohorts, but we are keen to gather ideas from current Edexcel teachers and other interested parties regarding new specification content and assessment design.

Whether you have ideas for new topics, theories or studies to bring A Level Psychology up-to-date and to align it more closely with students' interests and concerns, or ideas about new ways of assessing students to allow them to better showcase their knowledge and skills, or anything else about a new specification, we'd love to hear from you. Please use the form linked below.

• Complete our short form with your ideas for a new A Level specification

'examWizard' is a free exam preparation tool containing a bank of past Edexcel exam questions, mark schemes and examiners' reports for a range of GCSE, GCE, Functional Skills subjects & BTEC sectors.

It allows you to select and build your own mock exams with access to past exam questions across series.  

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  To find out more about the benefits of exam wizard and how to use this useful tool.

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In case you missed this in last month's update, here's the link again to access recordings of the exam feedback training on last summer's GCSE papers.

These resources are all under the 'silver padlock' meaning you will need your Edexcel Online login to access and the videos are unlisted on Youtube. This is to protect the papers for teachers who are planning on using them as mock papers later in this academic year.

examWizard

'examWizard' is a free exam preparation tool containing a bank of past Edexcel exam questions, mark schemes and examiners' reports for a range of GCSE, GCE, Functional Skills subjects & BTEC sectors.

It allows you to select and build your own mock exams with access to past exam questions across series.  

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• Find out more about examWizard
  To find out more about the benefits of exam wizard and how to use this useful tool.

examWizard: step-by-step 560.8 KB pdf /content/dam/pdf/services/examwizard-user-guide-new.pdf false

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We are in the process of preparing some pre-recorded exam feedback training to share lessons from the January 2024 International A Level psychology exam series. Due to the availability of the senior examiner writing the resources this will be available at the end of April, and we hope will provide some really valuable insights into how best to prepare students for the May/June series this year, and future series. More details to follow in next month's update.