GCSE Psychology (OCR)

31 free revision lessons in 7 units. Open the course or go straight to a lesson.

Criminal Psychology

What makes people offend — how crime is defined and measured, social learning and Eysenck's criminal personality as explanations, and how punishment and rehabilitation try to change behaviour.

1. Defining and Measuring Crime
2. The Social Learning Theory of Criminality
3. Eysenck's Criminal Personality Theory
4. Punishment, Deterrents and Rehabilitation

Development

How thinking develops from childhood — stages of development and the growing brain, Piaget's theory of cognitive development, mindset and learning-styles research, and how all of it shapes education.

1. Stages of Development, the Brain and Intelligence
2. Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development
3. Learning Theories: Mindset and Learning Styles
4. Applying Development Theories to Education

Psychological Problems

Mental health in society — how it is defined and how attitudes have changed, the biological and psychological explanations of schizophrenia and clinical depression, and how treatments have developed.

1. Introduction to Mental Health
2. The Effects of Mental Health Problems
3. Schizophrenia: Characteristics and Explanations
4. Clinical Depression: Characteristics and Explanations
5. The Development of Treatments

Social Influence

Why we follow the crowd and obey authority — conformity, obedience and collective behaviour, the situational and dispositional factors that drive them, and how minority and majority influence create social change.

1. Conformity, Obedience and Crowd Behaviour
2. Situational Factors in Social Influence
3. Dispositional Factors in Social Influence
4. Social Change and Changing Attitudes

Memory

How we store and retrieve the past — information processing and forgetting, the multi-store model, the theory of reconstructive memory, and how memory research is used in advertising and recall.

1. Information Processing, Forgetting and the Brain
2. The Multi-Store Model of Memory
3. The Theory of Reconstructive Memory
4. Techniques Used for Recall

Sleep and Dreaming

Why we sleep and what dreams mean — the functions and stages of sleep, the Freudian theory of dreaming, the activation synthesis theory, and how insomnia is understood and treated.

1. The Nature and Functions of Sleep
2. The Freudian Theory of Dreaming
3. The Activation Synthesis Theory of Dreaming
4. Insomnia and its Treatment

Research Methods

The scientific toolkit that runs through every topic — hypotheses, variables and designs, sampling and ethics, the ways of doing research, and the data handling, statistics and bias that let you design and interpret an investigation.

1. Hypotheses, Variables and Experimental Designs
2. Sampling and Ethical Guidelines
3. Doing Research: Experiments, Self-Report and Observations
4. Case Studies, Correlations and Types of Data
5. Descriptive Statistics, Graphs, Reliability and Validity
6. Sources of Bias, Designing and Interpreting Investigations

How to revise Psychology

• Retrieval Practice
• Spaced Repetition
• Interleaving
• Dual Coding
• Elaborative Interrogation
• Knowledge Organisers
• Timed Practice

All subjects