May 2023 Psychology Subject Update

I hope that preparations for this summer's exam season are going well in your school or college, and that this update contains some useful information that will help you to support your students in their final lessons.

Examiner recruitment

The best wsa to improve your understanding of the requirements of exams is to become an examiner, and we still have some examiner vacancies for this summer's exam series. Do consider applying if you haven't already!

New training videos on Youtube channel

It was great to have so many teachers at our recent A Level and GCSE Psychology exam training events in April. For GDPR reasons recordings of the actual events can only be shared with colleagues who attended at least part of them, and if you did you should have recieved a recording. For those that couldn't attend I am producing a short Youtube video for each section of the training, and am organising these into a playlist for each event. Depending on when you read this update I may not have completed all the videos, but will do so over the next few days.

We will be producing 'Questions and Answers' documents for both events having sought some examiner input regarding some of the excellent questions raised by the teachers attending - these will take a few more days to complete and I will share them in another update.

If you haven't seen these already, the 'Q&A' document we produced following our November A Level Psychology exam feedback training is available via the link below, along with a one page document clarifying the demands of different types of A Level extended response question.

We have sadly not been able to offer a live training event for IAL Psychology teachers this academic year but will make this a priority for next year. I will be adding to my playlist of IAL exam feedback videos over the next few days however.

I hope that these videos will be useful for students as well as for teachers.

A Level teachers wanted for exam change consultation

We have previously consulted with a small group of teachers about changes we are considering making to the 2025 A Level exams. We are listening to feedback we have received, particularly about the issue of students running out of time in their A Level exams. While we don't want to make any major changes at this stage in the specification cycle (as we understand that any change will cause extra work for teachers) it is also clear that most teachers would welcome minor changes that reduced time pressure. We are keen to gather more views on possible changes and if you would be happy to attend a focus group online meeting, or to give feedback via a survey, please let us know your details via the form below.

Supporting students to write conclusions

In response to a teacher request we have made a resource for use in the classroom, based on an 8/8 response to an A Level 'evaluate' 8 marker, which aims to improve students' exam technique when it comes to writing mini-conclusions. 'Evaluate', 'assess' and 'to what extent' questions all require conclusions (or judgements) for the higher AO3 mark levels, but these can be in the form of mini-conclusions at the ends of paragraphs and a final conclusion is not required for top marks.

Exam timetables

See the links below for confirmation of all exam dates and times.