Common errors and omissions

To ensure a high score on your Internal Assessment in IB Psychology, you need to avoid errors and include essential information in your report. You will find some suggestions below:

Introduction

• Explicitly state the relevance of your aim. The relevance needs to be more than just replicating a study. Explain the broader implications and applications of the aim of your investigation.

• Your research and null hypotheses are the two of the most important sentences in your report. Reports that operationalise the IV and the DV most successfully use the word “significant”.

Exploration

• When you explain your choice of participants, describe both the target population and your sample and why those participants were suitable.

• In the context of controlled variables, explain how you either controlled for participant variability (independent measures) or the order effect (repeated measures design).

Analysis

• Do not include more than one measure of central tendency and dispersion.

• Interpret the results of both your descriptive and inferential statistics.

• Check that the number of tails of your hypotheses and your calculation match.

• The means do not provide any support for your hypothesis. Only inferential statistics enable you to reach a conclusion about your hypothesis.

• Provide the working of inferential statistics. This site on stats is highly recommended.

Evaluation

• Do not evaluate in terms of ecological validity. You are asked to evaluate your experimental design, not the experimental method.

• Modifications should be explicitly linked to an identified limitation.