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This final lesson turns everything you have learned about the developmental area into exam performance. Knowing the four studies deeply is necessary but not sufficient: Component 02 also tests whether you can apply developmental psychology to unfamiliar real-world material (the paper's Section C), and whether you can deploy your knowledge in the specific question formats the paper uses — outline and evaluate questions, compare-the-pair questions, and areas/perspectives/debates essays. This lesson works through both: first the application skill (recognising developmental psychology in a novel source and making evidence-based suggestions), then the technique for each major question type, each illustrated with a worked specimen. Mastering these turns secure knowledge into secure marks.
Section C is the part of the paper students most often underprepare, because it cannot be revised by memorising studies — it is a skill of transfer, applied on the day to a source you have never seen. But it is also very learnable, because the moves are the same every time: read the source, spot the psychology, apply a relevant study or concept, and weigh the suggestion's strengths and weaknesses. Similarly, each essay format rewards a recognisable structure. This lesson makes those moves and structures explicit, so that on the day you are executing a practised routine rather than improvising. The underlying message of the lesson is that exam success at this level is only partly about knowing more; beyond a certain point it is about deploying what you know in the exact shape the question demands — and that shape is predictable, teachable and rehearsable.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 02 element | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| Section C: applying developmental psychology to a novel source | Section C — Practical applications | AO2; AO3 |
| Making evidence-based suggestions from developmental research | Section C — Practical applications | AO2 |
| Outline/evaluate question technique | Section A — Core studies (exam skill) | AO1; AO3 |
| Compare-the-pair question technique | Section A — Core studies (exam skill) | AO1; AO3 |
| Areas/perspectives/debates essay technique | Section B — Areas, perspectives, debates | AO1; AO2; AO3 |
The specification is referenced descriptively; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for its exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (recalling the studies accurately under exam conditions), AO2 (applying developmental psychology to novel sources and scenarios) and AO3 (evaluating suggestions and structuring balanced essays).
In Section C you are given a novel source — an article, blog post, diary entry, email or similar — describing a real-world situation, and asked to recognise the psychology in it and make evidence-based suggestions, weighing their strengths and weaknesses. The source will typically describe a situation to which developmental (and other) psychology plausibly applies: a parent struggling with a child's behaviour, a school worried about aggression, a health worker trying to improve children's treatment adherence, a discussion of how children learn right from wrong.
What makes Section C distinctive — and distinctively demanding — is that it cannot be prepared by memorisation in the way the study lessons can. You will never have seen the exact source before, so there is no "right answer" to recall; there is only a skill of transfer to perform on the day. This frightens some students, but it should reassure you: because the source is novel, the examiner cannot expect an ideal, textbook response, and the marks go to sensible, well-grounded reasoning rather than to a memorised model. The students who do well are not those who have crammed the most facts but those who have practised the moves — reading a passage, spotting the psychology, applying a principle, and weighing the result. That is a rehearsable skill, and rehearsing it on a variety of made-up sources (a parenting-forum post, a news article about a school, a health-blog entry) is the best possible preparation. Treat every real-world description of children's behaviour you encounter as a chance to ask: "which developmental principle is at work here, and what would I suggest?"
The application skill breaks into four repeatable moves:
| Move | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1. Read for psychology | Identify the psychological content in the source — what behaviour, learning process or developmental issue is described |
| 2. Link to a study/concept | Connect it to a relevant developmental study or principle (e.g. modelling, reinforcement, moral stages, cultural values) |
| 3. Make a suggestion | Propose a concrete, evidence-based recommendation grounded in that study/principle |
| 4. Evaluate the suggestion | Weigh its likely strengths and weaknesses/limitations — will it work, and what might undermine it? |
The developmental studies are exceptionally well-suited to Section C because each supplies a clear, applicable principle:
Crucially, a top-band Section C answer does not stop at the suggestion; it evaluates it. Every suggestion has limits. Reinforcement schemes may produce only short-term change or a novelty effect (as Chaney's pilot could not rule out); modelling-based interventions assume the child identifies with the model; moral-discussion approaches take time and depend on the child's developmental readiness; culturally-sensitive suggestions risk over-generalising about a culture. Naming both the likely benefit and the limitation is what turns an AO2 suggestion into an AO2+AO3 answer worth full marks.
It is worth understanding why the evaluation of a suggestion is where so many marks sit, because it reflects something real about applied psychology. A suggestion that is offered with no sense of its limits is, in practice, dangerous: a parent or professional acting on it might be disappointed when it fails, or might apply it inappropriately. Real psychological practice is never "here is the intervention, it will work"; it is always "here is an evidence-based option, here is what the evidence says about how well and under what conditions it works, and here is what might undermine it". The examiner is therefore testing whether you can think like a psychologist advising a real person, not like a textbook reciting a finding. This is why an evaluation that engages with practicality (can the parent actually do this?), durability (will the effect last?), individual variation (will it work for this child?) and side-effects (could it backfire?) is so highly rewarded — those are exactly the considerations a responsible practitioner weighs. Framing your Section C evaluation around those practical questions, rather than around abstract methodological terms, is often what lifts an answer.
A common Section C error is to describe the study at length instead of applying it. The examiner does not want Chaney's sample and procedure recited; they want its principle (positive reinforcement) used to solve the problem in the source. Keep study description minimal and put your effort into the link, the suggestion and the evaluation. Another frequent error is to make a suggestion that is not actually grounded in the source — always tie your recommendation to a specific detail of the situation described.
A third, subtler error is to reach for the wrong study out of familiarity. Because Bandura and Chaney are the most memorable developmental studies, students sometimes force them onto sources where a different principle fits better. If a source is really about moral behaviour — a child lying, or struggling to understand why a rule matters — then Kohlberg or Lee is the apt reference, not Bandura. Reading the source carefully to identify which developmental issue is actually present, and matching it to the right principle, is part of the skill. It also helps to remember that Section C sources rarely map onto a single area of psychology: a source about a child's behaviour might invite developmental, social and cognitive suggestions, and a strong answer can draw on more than one, provided each is genuinely grounded in the source. The developmental principles set out above are your contribution from this course to what will usually be a richer, multi-area response.
A final practical tip on structuring a Section C answer under time pressure: deal with the source's demands one at a time. If, as in the worked example below, the source raises two problems (aggression and inhaler refusal), tackle each in its own mini-cycle — link, suggest, evaluate — rather than bundling them. This keeps your answer organised, ensures you evaluate each suggestion (rather than making two suggestions and evaluating neither), and makes it easy for the examiner to credit each move. The four-move routine is fractal: it works for the whole answer and for each sub-part within it.
Section A "outline" and "evaluate" questions test your core-study knowledge directly. The command word tells you exactly what is wanted:
Two disciplines separate strong answers. First, answer the specific aspect named: "evaluate in terms of ecological validity" is not an invitation to discuss ethics — read the question and stay on the named criterion. Second, be two-sided even in evaluation: a strength and a weakness of the named aspect, with a brief judgement, outscores a one-sided list. The worked examples in the individual study lessons (Bandura's validity, Chaney's self-report, Kohlberg's sample, Lee's results) model exactly this discipline.
The reason the specific-aspect discipline matters so much is that OCR evaluation questions are usually targeted rather than open. An open "evaluate Bandura's study" invites you to range across method, ethics, validity and sampling; but a targeted "evaluate Bandura's study in terms of its ecological validity" is asking for a deep treatment of one criterion. On a targeted question, the student who writes a paragraph each on ethics, sampling and reliability has misread the question and will be credited for almost none of it, however accurate it is, because none of it addresses ecological validity. Conversely, the student who writes two developed sides on ecological validity — the artificiality of the Bobo situation and the demand-characteristics concern against the replications with filmed and real models — hits the target squarely. Training yourself to underline the named criterion before you write, and to keep asking "is this sentence about the named aspect?", is one of the cheapest ways to gain marks on this question type.
It also helps to have, for each study, a small stock of pre-prepared evaluation points organised by criterion, so that when a targeted question names "validity" or "the sample" or "the data", you can immediately deploy the two or three relevant points rather than hunting for them. The individual study lessons are organised exactly this way — each has separate evaluation sub-sections for method, data, ethics, validity, reliability and sampling — precisely so that you can revise evaluation by criterion and walk into the exam with a targeted answer ready for whichever aspect is named.
A note on detail calibration: the mark allocation signals how much to write. A short-tariff "outline the sample" wants the key facts crisply (who, how many, how selected); a higher-tariff "describe the procedure" wants the staged detail. Padding a low-tariff answer wastes time you need elsewhere; under-detailing a high-tariff one loses AO1 marks. Let the marks guide the depth. A useful rule of thumb is roughly one distinct, creditable point per mark available: a 3-mark outline wants about three accurate facts, a 6-mark evaluation wants roughly three developed evaluative points (ideally spanning both sides), and a longer answer proportionately more. Thinking in "points per mark" stops you both from padding a short answer and from starving a long one.
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