Starting in September, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) has been publishing 2024 course reports, including for psychology at National 5 and Higher.
The psychology Higher was taken by 2,495 students in 2024, making it the 22nd most popular subject at that level.
Here are six key points to emerge from the psychology course reports at National 5 and Higher, as teachers prepare students for exams and assessment in 2025:
1. Unethical topics
At Higher, there was a small increase in ethical breaches where students carried out unethical research; schools must ensure that candidates follow the British Psychological Society ethical guidelines.
“A number of candidates conducted research that potentially put their participants at risk of physical or psychological harm, discomfort or stress,” the Higher psychology SQA course report states.
These included:
- Jenness- or Asch-style replications
- Manipulating participants’ pre-sleep routine; for example, exposing participants to blue light before sleep or changing their caffeine consumption (including asking participants to consume caffeine before going to sleep)
- Depriving participants of sleep in some way
- Using impossible or difficult maths problems during testing
- Approaching strangers to act as participants, which “puts candidates at risk”
- Using participants who were under 16
- Blindfolding participants.
The report states: “Of particular concern was the number of questionnaires asking invasive and inappropriate questions.”
These included questions on: low mood or depression; anxiety levels; medical conditions and history; medication; drug and alcohol consumption; learning difficulties; whether participants have sleep disorders or were on medication that affected their sleep; and questions on self-esteem levels in groups where there were already potentially low levels of self-esteem.
Students are advised to submit a proposal for for National 5 assignment, so that centres can “guard against unethical or impractical topics”.
Although there were fewer unethical studies than in previous years, some N5 students were planning to: deprive participants of sleep; manipulate phone or caffeine use; choose under-16s as participants; and select strangers as participants.
2. Higher-order skills
Schools should continue to develop essential skills for the Higher course, particularly the higher-order skills of application and analysis.
The report states: “We remind centres that [in the question paper] candidates can be required to analyse sets of processes, theories and explanations as well as research studies, and should be prepared to do this.” Guidance on how to do this is given in various places, including an SQA Academy course.
3. Methodology
For the Higher assignment, guidance from schools on “the skills of ‘justifying’ and ‘applying’ their choice of method and descriptive statistics would...be beneficial for candidates”.
4. Terminology
Students should “use appropriate terminology and avoid terms such as ‘prove’, ‘statistical significance’ (unless inferential statistics have been calculated) and ‘relationship’ (unless correlational research designs have been used)”. They should also write in third person, “as the report is an objective account of their research process”.
5. Optional topics
In the National 5 optional topics, it is important that schools choose appropriate research studies, as these are not named in the specification; they should refer to marking guidance.
6. Hypotheses
National 5 students should be given the opportunity to practise writing hypotheses.
For the latest in Scottish education delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for Tes’ The Week in Scotland newsletter
