Product Description

All you need to know, and more, for the OCR Psychology AS Level. It covers all 15 core research papers and explains why and how they were carried out. It also explores the conclusions we can draw from the studies, and looks at what happened next.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5813 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review

"This book is a truly excellent resource which will be invaluable to anyone taking OCR AS Psychology. It is well written, well organised, comprehensive, and easy to read. I just wish it had been available when I was a student! In short, a must-have and a must-read." - Professor Mark Griffiths, Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University.

"This thoroughly engaging book provides the student with a comprehensive guide to AS-Level Psychology. Accurate, accessible, and even challenging, this visually stunning textbook will suit all types of learners and enable them to succeed in their exams. Rarely does a textbook tick so many boxes. My students will love it." - Mark Holah, Head of Psychology, Wyke Sixth Form College.

"This new edition is an excellent resource for the delivery of the new OCR specification. Its lively and colourful presentation makes it highly accessible to students, and its broad background and extension material mean it is invaluable to teachers seeking to plan engaging delivery of its Core Studies in a modern context. An all-round winner!" - Anna Ross, Psychology Course Team Leader, Long Road Sixth Form College.

'This new edition is an excellent resource for the delivery of the new OCR specification. Its lively and colourful presentation makes it highly accessible to students and its broad background and extension material means it is invaluable to teachers seeking to plan engaging delivery of its Core Studies in a modern context. Exam-style questions with guidance and ‘quickie’ quiz questions help students develop their skills and the varied activities, related research and website suggestions provide useful material for differentiation. An all-round winner!' - Anna Ross, Psychology Course Team Leader, Long Road Sixth Form College

Praise for the first edition:

'This book is visually stunning and will be highly appealing to both teachers and students. It is also designed to aid a reader’s comprehension of the material. The book’s overwhelming visual appeal, logical formatting, accuracy, psychological insight and inspiration should all guarantee its success.' - Beth Black, former senior examiner and teacher, Long Road Sixth Form College

'I think this a fascinating and wonderful book. The students will love it and so will the teachers.' - Diana Dwyer, Head of Psychology, Joseph Whitaker School, Rainworth

From the Publisher

As the Editor at Psychology Press, responsible for `OCR Psychology: AS Core studies', I would like to respond to the comments made on this book by Andy B. His main concerns seem to be with regards to the layout of the book and the supposed lack of answers provided to the questions posed throughout.

The layout has been specifically designed to resemble magazine style spreads. Our feedback suggests that students respond really well to this style, as many prefer to read in this way. The course content is made accessible, understandable and teachable in bite-sized chunks. The presentation of the core study material is very clearly laid out, splitting the study into abstract, aims and procedure, results etc and the level of detail is just right for students preparing for the OCR examination.

This layout also includes a number of features designed to help students understand the material such as:

• `Connections' icons (based on London tube map) which facilitate and underline connections between the core studies.


• Starters and Afters to provide interesting detail to place the studies in context, by making links to real-life situations so the studies come alive.


• Summaries of the core studies which are given as flow charts at the end of each chapter to provide students with helpful revision cues.

We are publishing a new edition of this book in July 2008 which will be designed in full-colour, whilst maintaining the same layout and strong visual
appeal.This information provides students with a thorough indication of how to answer all questions, but as the answers are not given in the book, they are encouraged to think for themselves first rather than being spoon-fed the answers. Evaluation skills are a key part of the OCR specification and this book allows students to develop these skills by use of searching questions related to key issues.

We do, however, provide student answers complete with examiner comments to all the exam questions at the end of each chapter in the book. These are designed to help students with exam preparation as we appreciate that there is a lot to cram in to term-time teaching so it helps to focus specifically on the exam requirements as well. The examiners' marks and comments really give readers insight and working knowledge of how to target their responses.

In conclusion, in our view this is an excellent book and a key element of our successful A-Level programme. We believe that the market agrees as sales have exceeded our expectations and we had to reprint twice in quick succession after just over a year.

From the Back Cover

This book prepares students for all the elements of the OCR AS exam. It gives the who, what, where, and even the why of each of the core studies. It also looks at some of the work that followed the studies. Specifically it covers:

• Core studies: an abstract of each study plus ample details of the aims, method, results and conclusions. Guidance is given on how each study can be evaluated and a wealth of extra materials is provided for each study – practical activities, discussion ideas, multiple-choice and exam-style questions, diagrammatic summaries, further reading and video links.
• Background to each core study: information about related research before and after the study; and biographical details of the researcher(s).
• Key issues: sixteen issues are discussed to cover the themes of the course and prepare students for the long-answer questions.
• A 'Psychological Investigations' chapter helps students to understand research methods in psychology, necessary for the Psychological Investigations exam and also for understanding the core studies themselves.
• Exam guidance: short and long answer exam-style questions answered by students with examiner’s comments.

The book is presented in magazine-style spreads to aid the learning process, and has been thoroughly revised to match the requirements of the new OCR specification.

The book’s accompanying website contains

• Answers to all exam questions.
• Suggested evaluations.

Customer Reviews

An excellent text for OCR psychology
This is the business: it picks out all the key points for each of the 20 core studies in terms of background, the study itself, evaluation questions and it has self-check questions too.

Learn what is in here and get an 'A' grade!

Appalling from start to finish
This book is a complete mystery to me. Or rather how such a high profile publishing house, which specialises in psychology, would publish such an ill-conceived product is a mystery.

To start with, the layout is utterly appalling. No other word will do.

According to the back cover blurb, Beth Black of Long Road Sixth Form College is impressed by the book's "overwhelming visual appeal, logical arrangement, accuracy, psychological insight and inspiration..."

I don't think so.

Firstly, it is indeed visually "overwhelming." But appealing? No way. In fact it is a total mess.

For some unfathomable reason the contents are set out in "coloured," erratically arranged blocks of pale orange, dark (1960's) orange, white, mid-grey and black. Most of the text is in black, except where it is white on black or in mid-strength orange on pale orange or on mid-grey. Did anyone at the publishers stop to consider how difficult it would be for many people to read the text in those last two colour combinations? Presumably not!

It is also a complete mystery why the text is set out in coloured blocks, of differing proportions, at all. The practise presents the information in a totally fractured manner with no natural flow from one block to the next, and certainly nothing resembling "logical formating." Worse yet, this confusing layout also conceals the fact that the authors ask questions for which they have not provided any answer. Which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the wealth of *irrelevant* material that IS included - like the totally uneven "biographical notes" - Elizabeth Loftus gets over half a page (page 6), Beatrix Gardner gets about one sixth of a page (page 31), and Jan Deragowski gets six lines in a tiny little box in the bottom right-hand corner of page 15!
Great idea for a textbook - not!

As an example of what's missing, on pages 33 and 75 the authors write (top left hand corner in both instances): "This study was a case study. What are the strengths and limitations of this research method in the context of this study?" But where have they provided such information? Even the larger box at the top of page 203 - "Case Studies" - fails to give even a fleeting indication of how to answer that question.
Moreover the whole of the material on Freud's case of Little Hans (pages 72-75) seems to be referred to as a "case history" rather than a "case study", until we get to the question on page 75. Does this mean that "case history" and "case study" are synonymous? Who knows? The book doesn't provide the necessary information.

Of course it might be an interesting topic for debate if we had a few hours to spare, and reaching an accurate conclusion didn't much matter. But students using this book have something like 20 weeks of term time in which to cover 20 so-called "core studies" before they take the three part AS exam.

As for accuracy, check out the table on page 22. Surely only a someone who was completely numerically illiterate could fail to notice that the numbers are arranged incorrectly?

In the next study, on the training of Washoe, the authors claim that the chimp produced "her own novel combinations such as 'open food drink' ([meaning] open the fridge)..."
Which wasn't, in fact, the case. Washoe actually signed "to open + to eat + to drink."
The difference may have seemed unimportant to these authors, but in terms of learning a language, the two versions of Washoe's communication were definitely significant.

Just my opinion, but I really think students deserve a textbook that adheres to far higher standards than this.