Making your life easier
Many of you are on a well-deserved break now, and so it's time to think about how you can make your life a little easier next year. Below are a few suggestions for ensuring that you are not doing all of the work, but the students are also putting in some effort. These suggestions are partly based on the type of questions we get throughout the year. Apologies in advance to teachers of the November course, but I hope this will be useful when you have time to read it.
Going for the obvious examples
Some creative students like to argue about whether or not a study is a good example to use to illustrate a theory. While this is a good critical thinking and discussion exercise, the questions to ask them are, “What was the aim of the study?” “What did the researchers claim their findings showed?” If the answer to these questions is not the process or theory about which they have been asked in a question, then the study is not a good example. Encourage the student to either find a study that directly investigates a particular theory or process or, encourage them to come up with their own everyday example. (These examples can be collected by the class, so they do not have to be thought of instantly in the exam). Students who would like to use Maguire for neurotransmission or Sparrow for cognitive load theory should be sent to read the study summary if they are still not convinced.
Keeping the practicals practical
When planning class practicals, remember to keep things as straightforward and simple as possible: one topic, chosen by the teacher, that can be researched using all four methods, each with its own aim. The topic can be from any context, and students do not need to calculate results. Though often they really want to, and this is a good time to teach some simple statistics. The experiment should have two conditions only, and all research is simplified if opportunity samples of participants over 16 years of age are selected.
An interesting problem
Instead of students starting planning their IA with a research question, they should start with the idea of a problem that affects a population of people in which they are interested. If their grandparent is lonely, then maybe a student could look at how to investigate isolation and loneliness amongst older people living alone and suggest solutions for this. Loneliness is strongly related to depression amongst older people and there will be plenty of relevant background research. Or perhaps they would like to interview young gymnasts about the link between this and an eating disorder, and propose practical or policy solutions. Remember this is a proposal, so this is where they can be creative.
If the student cannot identify the problem that their IA is proposed to investigate, then they cannot do the IA on this topic. It's a simple as that, and they will need to find another topic. Finally, after writing four IA proposals for InThinking, I can honestly say that the easiest IA proposal to plan and write is either the interview/focus group or the survey/questionnaire. I would encourage students to go for these methods rather than an observation or experiment, which are more challenging to plan.
If you have any tips for keeping life simple, please feel free to add them in the comments below.