Excelling Psychology

I, Jyotika Varmani, tutor students of Psychology at all levels. I reside in Mumbai and tutor students online. You can contact me personally on my e-mail id jyotikapsychology@gmail.com or call/message me on 9892507784 for enquiries. --- AS and A-level studies are to be prepared with respect to their descriptions, the issues and debates they involve and the description and evaluation of the research method they adopt. As concerns the last type of preparation, I have had a number of queries by students which have all suggested to me that they simply do not engage in this type of preparation explicitly. That is, students assume that preparing for the description of studies with the syllabus guidelines will automatically prepare them to describe and evaluate the research methods employed in the studies. This is not the truth and in order to show how far taken away this notion is from reality, in this post, I use a part of the study by Laney et.al. to illustrate how a description and evalu...

I, Jyotika Varmani, tutor students of Psychology at all levels. I reside in Mumbai and tutor students online. You can contact me personally on my e-mail id jyotikapsychology@gmail.com or call/message me on 9892507784 for enquiries. --- Year after year, assessments of AS and A psychology papers reveal this one striking issue - students fail to identify the independent variable in novel research stimuli presented to them. Expectedly, this inability is further reflected in their failure to correctly formulate an independent variable in the answer which requires them to design a study of their own. Since the ability to identify the independent variable is so fundamental to the AS and A levels, in the present post, I present you with a detailed but easy, illustrated conceptual understanding of the same; followed by a few exercises for you to sharpen your skills: What is an independent variable? Let's begin with what a variable is. A variable is anything that changes from time to time...