In page 293 of the A2 book, the Mann-Whitney U test. Half way down it should say N1=10 instead of N1=0. Thanks to Ruth Bailey of Akeley Wood School for pointing this out.
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A student recently pointed out an error in the AS Book on page 119 – in the Do it yourself feature we have suggested that one way to help yourself to remember the terms related to the body’s response to stress is to use more familiar ideas to represent the different words. For example, you might try to remember those Spanish cousins ‘Adrena Cortez’ (the adrenaline junkie) ‘Adrena Medulla’ (with her cortisol habit). However that is the wrong way round – Adrena Cortez has the cortisol habit. Sorry! Thanks to Jasmine Nelson for pointing this out (and telling us how much she liked this blog).
You can see more spreads on the sample chapter tab or go to bookshop to order your copy.
In the AQA A AS Complete Companion we have subdivided conformity into majority and minority influence. There was a reason for this – when the new specification was first published minority influence was a named topic so we wrote material on it. However, in a very late revision, minority influence was removed from the specification. However we (as well as other textbooks) left it in because it is an important part of the social change topic – social change is due to minority rather than majority influence.
It is arguable as to whether ‘conformity’ refers only to majority influence or can include minority influence – for example, the Scottish higher exam talks about conformity to majority and minority influence. We elected to include minority influence under the heading ‘conformity’. However, AQA’s ruling is that conformity is solely concerned with majority influence. This means that, in the exam, students will get no marks for material or research studies on minority influence in a question on conformity.
However material on minority influence can be made creditworthy when asked about the implications of social influence research for social change, so it remains an important topic of study.
Thanks to Emma Marsh for raising this issue.
The book is out now! You can buy copies here.
We have posted some sample pages on this site (see ‘Sample Chapters’) and there are also suggested answers to the Mock Exam (see ‘Book Resources’).
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We are currently working on the AS Visual Companion which promises to be quite a sensation – have a peek at some sample pages (see ‘Sample Chapters’). The book is due out in May.
I am again grateful to an enquiry from a teacher about an apparent contradiction – this time between our AS Complete Companion and another AS book. Logie (1995) proposed that the visuo-spatial sketchpad (a component of the working memory model) could be further divided into a visual cache and inner scribe. In the Complete Companion we have said that the cache is a store and the scribe deals with spatial relations, whereas another AS book says that the cache is a store and the scribe is a rehearsal mechanism. Both versions are correct and both lack detail.The visual cache is a passive store. It holds information about form and colour. However some research evidence (e.g. Coleman and LeFevre, 2002) has found that information is actively rehearsed.The inner scribe is an active rehearsal component. It is proposed to deal with spatial and movement information. There also may be some storage component.Any further comments welcome!
The WJEC AS Complete Companion was published (finally) on Friday 23 October. I only received my copy in the post this morning so hopefully everyone will receive theirs soon. Please do let us know your thoughts – good as well as bad! If you do come across mistakes then let us know so we can put them right.
The answers to the Can You questions can be found under the ‘Book Resources’ tab (the ones for Chapter 6 are coming very soon).
I was recently asked by a teacher to explain an apparent contradiction in the text on working memory. On page 12 of the AS Complete Companion the text says that the central executive component of the Working Memory Model has a ‘very limited capacity’ but later, on the same page the text says the central executive has ‘no storage capacity’. Sounds like a contradiction! But on closer inspection there isn’t a contradiction – of course the the central executive has to have some capacity to direct attention but it has no extra storage capacity. I did double check this with Professor Alan Baddeley, who says ‘I assume that the executive has limited attentional capacity, but does not act as a store. Central storage in working memory is now assumed to depend on the episodic buffer’.
Keep your queries coming in!
The suggested answers for the ‘Can You’ questions from Chapters 1-4 are now available (click the ‘book resources’ tab). At the moment the formatting has been lost but hopefully this will be resolved soon!
I have been sent a query about core and optional sleep as there is some contradiction between what we said in the 1st and 2nd editions of the A2 Complete Companion. Looking around the other A2 textbooks, there seems to be a wide variety of explanations – most of which are not correct. Jim Horne proposed the concepts of core and optional sleep as a different perspective to the REM/non-REM distinction, which means that it is not possible to say the core sleep includes or doesn’t include REM sleep. Horne’s concept was that core sleep is essentially the first hours of sleep, and thus refers to mainly slow wave sleep (SWS) but includes some REM sleep. As the night progresses there is less SWS sleep and more REM sleep. Optional sleep is the sleep that occurs later in the night and which appears to be less crucial. This consists mainly of REM sleep but has some SWS/non-REM sleep.I hope that is clear! Thanks to Jo Haycock for pointing the inconsistency out to me.