Revd M R Bushby

Courses: AS and Advanced (A2) AQA(A)
No prior study of GCSE Psychology is required.

Psychology is most commonly defined as ‘the scientific study of the mind, behaviour and experience’. The mind is the totality of mental processes (such as perception, attention or intellectual functioning). Behaviour includes the study of what people do: being aggressive or kind; thinking and seeing; growing up and getting old; being a friend or a parent. Experience is to understand behaviour, we also consider what the experience is like for the individual doing the behaving.

The objectives are:

• to enable students to gain knowledge and understanding of psychological theories, terminology, concepts, studies and methods in the core areas of Cognitive, Social, Developmental and Individual Differences (abnormality), and express these skills in a clear and effective manner;
  
• to develop the capacity to analyse and evaluate psychological theories, concepts, studies and methods in the essential areas of the specification;
  
• to design, conduct and report psychological investigation(s), choosing from a range of methods and considering the issues of reliability, validity and ethics;
  
• to collect and draw conclusions from data;
  
• to develop the capacity to analyse and evaluate psychological principles, perspectives and applications in the core areas and discover how different subject areas relate to each other (synoptic assessment), giving the students the chance to develop an overview of the subject with novel case studies.

The students visit a nursery to gain experience in child development and the critical issue of day care.