Psychology FAQs

Psychology for the IB Diploma Programme: 2025 Subject Guide

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Discover how to effectively teach the new IB DP Psychology subject guide from September 2025 and learn how Pearson's new IB DP Psychology textbook, developed in cooperation with the IB, can support you.

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Subject Guide

Can you give an example of facilitating the integration of Contents, Concepts and Contexts?

The role of cognitive bias in decision making → The role of anchoring bias in decision making as a learning objective → The role of environmental factors is related to operating conditioning. Then within the contexts, in many of the subheadings, you’ll have natural alternative explanations.

In the Subject Guide, there are at least two natural critical thinking concepts (with a small ‘c’), alternative explanations.

Whenever you see examples of alternative explanations, that immediately feeds into the Concept of Perspective. Read the related terms under each Concept.

Under Perspective, you've got this idea of alternative explanations. In the Context, for example, of rival treatment, competing treatments, competing explanations.

Do each of the Concepts have to be taught/linked to each of the Contexts? Will all Concepts be examined within each Context?

The Concepts are fundamental to teaching in any first-year Psychology course.

The Concepts only need to be taught once, and it is probably most effective for student learning to teach them in association with one of the Contexts.

The Pearson Psychology for the IB Diploma Programme Student Book spreads conceptual thinking throughout, so that all the three ‘C’s are discussed together.

Studies

As the students don’t have to memorise so many studies, do you feel that they will still need the two implicit skills of ‘writing fast’ and ‘remembering a lot’?

Will we still be able to prepare a set number of studies as evidence or examples to use in exam responses?

The IB are moving away from memorising a structured outline and from memorised template answers. But there are Content/Learning Objectives for which it just makes sense to learn about some classic/key studies, for example, Classical conditioning – Pavlov, Social Identity Theory (Sherif, 1954). Students won’t be expected to know the details of these studies, such as the number of participants.

With regards to not memorising studies – do students still need to include descriptions of studies in SAQs and ERQ?

Planning

How can I plan the course over the two years?

If you view the course in terms of approximately symmetrical blocks labelled Contexts (the Context is the anchor), you’ll have four anchors and then around that you're going to input your Content and your Concepts. (Relatively symmetrical chunks because health and wellbeing have an extra subheading.)

If you want to teach four symmetrical blocks plus the IA, interweave your research methods into your Contexts.

If you think about it as four symmetrical blocks of knowledge, for a two-year course, it will be two in DP1, and then two in DP2.

Is it possible to prepare for the IB exam in one year in this revised curriculum?

As a rule, you must assure the IB that you're doing concurrency of learning over two years, if the rule does not apply to your school and you have double the number of hours that you would have if you were doing it over two years, then yes, it's perfectly doable. You should also consider the maturity of the students are 16, 17, or 18 years old.

Higher Level extensions

What does it mean that HL students need to go deeper for HL extensions?

Regarding the HL extensions, it seems that there is a lot of material that needs to be covered, do we need to cover all of it?

Practicals

How in-depth and detailed do the practical assignments need to be? Are they in effect mini-IAs? How much should they be guided? Opportunities to explore and make errors? Or assessed?

Can you give some examples of the experiments that are to be conducted for the class practical?

You can conduct any experiment. The purpose is for students to see and learn about what goes in to planning and conducting an experiment.

There are some examples in the Pearson Psychology for the IB Diploma Programme Student Book. After each Class Practical, students should review it, taking into account the four related exam questions (Paper 2 Section A).

There is some ambiguity in terms of the conduction of the class practical, if it is to be done in groups

Assessment

Can students who do a retake for Psychology in the old curriculum, move their IA forward? Or should they redo the IA in the new form?

Is the IA effectively the same? And if so, why can't students carry it out? The carrying out bit is only a few extra hours and a lot of fun! Or is the idea that the IA is a development of one of the class practical assignments? And should we be providing the opportunity for a full IA practice as in the past?

The IA has changed. It is an individual activity not a group activity. The IA is a research proposal using one of the four Research Methods (Experiment, Interview, Observation, Survey/Questionnaire), ie. not just an experiment.

Students are required to propose it but not conduct it. Because it is an assessment activity, schools/teachers should be careful to ensure it is the work of only the student i.e., there is no support/collusion from other students.

Will students be given the sources they need to cite in Paper 3?

Do we still have command terms?