H567/02 Section C - Using psychology to improve a novel situation
A novel source describes a new situation. The task is to recognise its psychological content, propose specific evidence-informed changes and evaluate those actual changes. The source supplies circumstances; it does not establish a diagnosis or a causal explanation.
Read the situation before choosing psychology
Separate what the source reports, what it claims explains the report, and what remains unknown. Then identify a behaviour or experience that could be improved. A useful target is specific enough to connect a mechanism to an action: “recall during quiet examinations” is more informative than “make students better”. Do not diagnose someone from a short account or invent a detail because it suits a favourite study.
Written formats influence how information is presented, but not whether every claim is true. These five original miniature sources illustrate different demands:
| Format and source | Psychological content and a limit |
|---|---|
| Newspaper: “The college says complaints about shouting rose after a new canteen opened. The headline calls it an aggression crisis.” | Identify reported shouting and changed circumstances. A temporal association and dramatic headline do not establish the canteen as the cause. |
| Magazine: “A witness feature asks, ‘How terrifying was the crash?’ before collecting readers' recollections.” | Question wording may influence reports. Readers' experiences and accuracy are not independently verified. |
| Blog: “I revise with café noise because matching my mood must help me remember.” | Environmental memory cues are relevant, but mood matching is a different claim from matching auditory context. |
| Diary: “I saw my friend calmly ask to join a game, then tried the same words.” | Observational learning is a plausible explanation, but one account does not establish a general intervention effect. |
| Email: “Please propose two changes to our revision club and explain how they would work.” | Identify the actual users, available resources and requested outcomes before selecting changes. |
Translate the source into a cautious claim: “a modelling strategy might help respectful requests”, rather than “this proves Bandura”. Core-study evidence from component 02 supplies mechanisms; component 01 helps test a proposal and identify confounds. Compulsory mental-health knowledge reminds us that ordinary distress is insufficient for diagnostic classification.
Choose evidence and explain the mechanism
Three studies provide usable ideas, each with a boundary:
Grant et al. (1998): studying and testing meaningful material in matching silent or noisy contexts produced better memory performance than mismatching contexts. For a quiet examination, quiet revision may make contextual cues more similar. Matching concerns the study and retrieval environments; the experiment did not show that noise is always bad or that mood matching produces the same effect. OCR core-studies guide, pp21–25.
Bandura et al. (1961): children exposed to an aggressive adult model later reproduced more distinctive aggressive acts. Observation can therefore inform a proposal to demonstrate specific respectful behaviour. The step from young children's doll aggression to older students' cooperation is a transfer that needs testing; it is not an outcome already proved by that experiment. The 1961 procedure did not directly reward the model or observer. Original study.
Loftus and Palmer (1974): changing the verb in a crash question changed speed estimates; later false reports of broken glass were more frequent following “smashed” than “hit” or no speed question. This supports avoiding suggested details and emotive wording when collecting accounts. Neutral wording reduces one possible source of influence; it does not guarantee a perfect memory or prove which individual account is accurate. OCR guide, pp16–19.
Choose evidence because the mechanism addresses the source, not because its name is familiar. State the finding briefly, connect it to what a proposed change does, and qualify any transfer to a new age group, behaviour or setting. Several defensible proposals may fit; a named study is useful only when its relevant content is explained.
Develop two suggestions: what, how and why
Read this complete original email:
To the student-support team: Our revision club meets beside a busy café, where music and conversations are audible. Final written examinations take place in quiet rooms. We have a bookable quiet classroom for the club's existing weekly session. During shared tasks, some members interrupt and copy a popular older student's mocking responses to mistakes. Two volunteer peer mentors can attend the session. Please suggest at least two ways to improve revision and respectful participation without excluding any members.
A developed suggestion joins what will change, how it will be implemented and why a psychological mechanism could improve the stated situation. Repeating “use psychology” or giving a study description without a change misses the application.
Suggestion 1 — contextual matching. Move the club's existing weekly revision session to the bookable quiet classroom. Keep the same materials and duration, agree a quiet working period and explain that examinations will also be quiet. This supplies a feasible implementation using the available room. Grant's matching-context finding suggests that similar auditory cues at study and retrieval may support recall. The purpose is recall in quiet examinations, not a claim that silence removes every learning difficulty.
Suggestion 2 — model respectful participation. Have the two peer mentors demonstrate a short exchange in which one makes an error and the other listens, responds calmly and invites another attempt. Practise that exchange in small groups during the existing session and repeat the demonstration when new members join. This addresses the described copying of mocking behaviour with visible alternative responses. Bandura's imitation finding supplies a rationale for observational learning, while the claim that it will increase cooperation in this club remains a proposal to test.
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