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!
Posts published during September, 2009
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.
Someone (not me!) mistakenly included a claim on the back cover of the A2 Complete Companion that we would be supplying answers to the ‘Can You’ questions on this blog. We did not intend to do this – partly because it would be a mammoth task! But equally it would somehow defeat the purpose to give students ‘an answer’. The intention of the A2 ‘Can Yous’ was to help students break their essays down into do-able chunks drawing on the material on the spread. While this might be useful to provide answers at AS, we didn’t think we should be providing this for A2 students. Having said that we do intend to produce an A2 exam companion (one day) which will provide some answers.
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Evidence Points To Conscious ‘Metacognition’ In Some Nonhuman Animals
September 18, 2009 by Adrian Frost.
(Link)
“For as long as IQ tests have existed, there has been a steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average scores people achieve at a given age, mainly because of a raising of the lower scores. On average, IQ is increasing by 3 per cent per decade. The effect is so strong that it implies that half of children in 1932, if given today’s tests, would score under 80 – the threshold for mental retardation.
Known as the Flynn Effect (after James Flynn), this phenomenon was initially dismissed as a result of changes in tests, or a reflection of better schooling. But the facts do not fit. Improvement is most marked in the types of test that relate least to educational content. Moreover, the effect is weakest in the cleverest children. It is a levelling-up phenomenon that results in a happy increase in equality.
After much agonising debate among psychologists, three explanations seem to make the most sense. The first is that (despite fast food) most children now get sufficient essential nutrients, vitamins, amino acids and oils to allow their Read the rest of this entry »
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Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch
September 7, 2009 by Adrian Frost.
Out of body experiences, scary rubber hands, kidding folk they have three arms, mind / body swaps……. I don’t know if this stuff is on the specification, but it should be, shouldn’t it?
Jenny Turner from Grimsby has sent us a copy of her Synoptic Toolkit worksheet. Inspired by the Introductory chapter in the ‘dog book’, she devised this worksheet to help her A2 students with the A2 synoptic topics. I have attached it here and it is also available at Psychexchange – a great sharing site for those of you who haven’t discovered it yet.
The AS WJEC textbook will be published by October 23rd. In the meantime you can download some chapters for free – click on ‘sample chapters’ on the tool bar.
Research due to be published this autumn in the USA journal Cancer suggests that too much stress can impact on surviving cancer. This study was a meta-analysis of 3.8 million people, cancer sufferers diagnosed between 1973 and 2004. Married people were found to have a 5 year survival rate of 63% compared to a 45% rate for those who were separated. The explanation offered is that the stress of a break-up in a serious relationship interferes with healing and recovery, and hence survival rates. The researchers suggest that the love and support of a partner is a key factor in battling illness, even one as serious as cancer, and their findings are supported by many previous studies. Of course, important other factors are also relevant – how many can you think of?