Posts archived in News
The new A2 Mini Companion is out and already a few people have kindly let us know about our mistakes (to err is human)
Page 8 At the top of the page, on the left hand side, it says ‘Ultradian rhythms’ and half way down says ‘Infradian rhythms’. These should be swapped. (Thanks to Jane Cochrane for letting us know).
Page 57 Under the subheading ‘Specification’ (about half way down the page), it says ‘Gender’ and should say ‘Intelligence and learning’. (Thanks to Sara Berman for this).
A2 Complete Companion, page 293, in Step 4 when referring to N1 it states 0 participants but should say 10. Thanks for point
ing this out Sally.
Catherine Harries of Coopers Coborn School has already spotted an error in the just released Exam Companion. On page 16, question 5 Alice’s answer says that STM has unlimited capacity and duration whereas LTM is limited. It should be the other way round. However, it may be worth pointing out that an examiner would still give her credit for this answer but not full marks.
Please do let us know if you spot any other errors.
Another gem in the Complete Companion series !
The book is published now! Order your copy here
Order your copies now, if you haven’t already, direct from OUP click here.
Free posters now available from OUP to brighten your classroom – you can start teaching from this straight away or use it as a revision tool with students.
The pictures are from the new AS Visual Companion.
The sales team who visit your school should have the posters.
Or you can write directly to claire.beatt@oup.com and ask for one.
If you’re a student currently using the Psychology AS & A2 Complete Companion series we’d like to hear your thoughts on a new publishing proposal to add some new resources to the series.
All who complete this survey by 7th February 2011 will go into a prize draw to win £100 worth of Amazon vouchers.
Here’s a link to the survey… (sorry the link didn’t work but it does now)
In Chapter 1 (Biological rhythms and sleep) of our A2 Complete Companion there is a contradiction (kindly
pointed out by Ruth Bailey of Akeley Wood School). On page 13 the text says that dolphins don’t have REM sleep whereas on page 14 the graph indicates a significant amount of REM sleep in dolphin. So which is correct?
The data for the graph was taken from a study Lyamin et al. (2004) of one dolphin, reported by the Phylogeny of Sleep Project (you can see the dolphin data here). As pointed out in our textbook much of the data about sleep is actually derived from very small samples and research conducted under poorly controlled conditions.
All of the other dolphin studies given by the Phylogeny of Sleep Project did not record the amount of REM sleep which is why we used the data from Lyamin et al. However this data is misleading as the general view appears to be that (REM) sleep is either absent in cetaceans (e.g. dolphins) or occupies an extremely small proportion of the day – an absolute maximum of 15 min each day (Manger et al., 2003). In fact a recent paper published by Lyamin et al. (2008) states that ‘We find that for cetaceans sleep is characterized by USWS [unihemispheric slow wave sleep] [and] a negligible amount or complete absence of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep’.
Some of you will have heard my talk last November at the Science and Pseudoscience conference explaining why Milgram’s study is not an experiment, even though he called it one. The same issue has arisen with Asch’s classic conformity experiment – oops – study. You can read the lengthy discussion over on psychexchange, but briefly …
In the WJEC AS book we have written (on page 72) Asch’s study is not an experiment and failed to explain why.
It is not an experiment because the behaviour being studied (conformity) is not caused by Asch’s manipulation. Some participants conformed whereas others didn’t (a kind of dependent variable). However this difference did not depend on any independent variable – the behaviour of the confederates or the different trials (confederates giving correct answer or erroneous answer). Therefore it is not an experiment, it is a demonstration of conformity or an investigation, if we want to label it. Asch did call it an experiment but people used the term more loosely then.
In his subsequent variations Asch was conducting an experiment e.g. he varied the size of the group which had an effect on whether participants conformed or not (one confederate led to little conformity, 3 led to more). We can therefore conclude that the size of the group causes conformity.
On page 69 (baseline study, paragraph 4) I have called it an experiment! An error.
