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Component 02 is the paper where knowledge and technique meet most directly. You arrive knowing twenty prescribed studies in depth; the paper decides how many marks that knowledge converts into by asking you to do four distinct things with it — to "tell the story" of a study, to evaluate one, to compare a classic with its contemporary partner, and to argue about areas, perspectives and debates using the studies as evidence. Each of these is a technique with a reliable shape, and each has a characteristic way of going wrong. The candidate who describes when asked to evaluate, who lists two studies side by side when asked to compare, or who asserts a debate position without evidencing it from the studies, loses marks not through ignorance but through mis-execution. This lesson drills all four techniques with worked specimen answers built from the real core studies — Milgram and Bocchiaro on obedience and disobedience, Loftus and Palmer and Grant on memory, Bandura on the transmission of aggression — so that on the day the shape of each answer is already in your hand.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 02 element | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| "Tell the story" recall of a core study (background, aim, method, results, conclusions) | Section A — the twenty core studies | AO1 accurate description of a study |
| Evaluating a core study (methodology, data, ethics, validity, reliability, sampling) | Section A — evaluation of studies | AO3 judgement of a study |
| The compare-the-pair question (classic vs contemporary; diversity; updating the theme) | Section A — classic and contemporary pairs | AO3 with AO1 comparison |
| The areas / perspectives / debates extended essay | Section B — areas, perspectives and debates | AO1 + AO3 argued essay |
The specification is referenced descriptively throughout; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for the exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (accurate knowledge of the prescribed studies), AO2 (using studies as evidence for a position) and AO3 (evaluation and comparison reaching supported judgements). It is deliberately technique-led: the content of the studies is taught in full in the five core-study courses; here we drill how to deploy that content under each Component 02 question type.
Component 02 examines the twenty core studies in three sections — A on the studies themselves, B on areas, perspectives and debates, and C on practical applications (worked in a separate lesson). Section A alone can ask you to describe, to evaluate or to compare, and these are not variations on a single skill. The table below sets out the four techniques this lesson drills and the assessment objective each is built around.
| Technique | Typical command | What the marks reward | Dominant AO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tell the story | Outline / describe the study | Accurate account of background, aim, method, results, conclusions | AO1 |
| Evaluate the study | Evaluate the study | Methodological, ethical and validity judgements reaching a view | AO3 |
| Compare the pair | Compare the two studies | Comparative threads and how far the contemporary updates the theme | AO3 + AO1 |
| Debates essay | Discuss / to what extent | An argued position evidenced by named studies across areas | AO1 + AO3 |
The organising insight is the same as in the structure lesson: decide the AO the command word targets, then shape the answer to it. Describe when asked to describe; judge when asked to evaluate; run comparisons when asked to compare; build a two-sided argument when asked to discuss. The rest of this lesson is what each of those shapes looks like in practice.
The distinctive OCR way of describing a core study is to tell its story in a fixed order: background (the question and context that prompted it), aim (what it set out to find), method (design, sample, materials/apparatus and procedure), results (the key findings) and conclusions (what the researchers inferred). This order is not decorative; it is the order the mark scheme rewards, and moving through it guarantees you leave nothing out.
Consider Milgram (1963). The background is post-war interest in destructive obedience and whether ordinary people would harm others when instructed by an authority. The aim was to see how far participants would obey an experimenter's instruction to give increasing electric shocks to another person. The method was a controlled observation at Yale: forty American men, recruited by newspaper advert, were assigned the role of "teacher" and instructed to deliver apparently increasing shocks (up to 450 volts) to a "learner" (a confederate) each time he erred, with the experimenter delivering standardised verbal prods. The results were that all forty continued to at least 300 volts and twenty-six of the forty (65%) went to the maximum 450 volts, many showing extreme tension. The conclusion was that ordinary people will obey a legitimate authority even to the point of apparently harming an innocent person, so obedience is powerfully situational.
Notice what a good "tell the story" answer does and does not do. It is accurate and specific — the sample size, the shock levels, the 65% figure — because vague description ("Milgram shocked people") earns little. But it is also proportionate to the marks: a short "outline" item wants the spine of the story, not every procedural detail. And crucially, in a describe question it does not evaluate — no "but the sample was biased" — because evaluation there wins no marks and costs time.
The commonest description error is smuggling in evaluation ("this was unethical because...") when the command word is "outline" or "describe". Save every evaluative word for the evaluate and compare questions, where it is worth marks. In a describe question, the discipline is to tell the story cleanly and stop.
A useful way to build reliable "tell the story" answers is to rehearse each of the twenty studies to a fixed skeleton until the spine of the story can be produced from memory without effort. For every study, be able to state in a sentence or two the background question it addressed, the precise aim, the design and the key facts of the sample (how many participants, and who they were), the essential steps of the procedure, the headline results including any decisive figures, and the conclusion the researchers drew. The value of a fixed skeleton is that it protects you against two opposite failures. The first is omission — under pressure it is easy to describe a vivid procedure at length and forget to state the aim or the conclusion, both of which the mark scheme credits. The second is disproportion — pouring detail into the part of the story you happen to remember best (often the procedure) while skating over the results and conclusions that actually answer the question. A student who has drilled the skeleton delivers a balanced account every time, and can then flex its length to the marks on offer, giving the bare spine for a short outline and fuller detail for a longer one. This is also the most efficient way to revise twenty studies: rather than re-reading pages of notes, you actively reconstruct each skeleton from memory and check it, which is precisely the retrieval practice that makes recall durable under exam conditions.
An evaluation question is AO3-dominated: the marks come from judgements, not from re-describing the study. A reliable way to generate a two-sided evaluation is to run through a fixed set of lenses and, for each, decide whether it is a strength or a weakness for this study and why it matters.
| Evaluation lens | Question to ask | Example (Milgram) |
|---|---|---|
| Method and design | Was it well controlled? What did the control buy or cost? | Standardised prods and setting give high control and replicability, but the lab is artificial |
| Ecological / external validity | Does it generalise beyond the setting? | Shocking a stranger in a lab is not everyday obedience — but later field variants supported it |
| Sampling | Who was studied, and who was left out? | Forty American men — androcentric and culturally narrow, limiting generalisation |
| Data type | Quantitative, qualitative, or both? What does each afford? | Quantitative shock levels are objective; qualitative observations of tension add richness |
| Reliability | Would it replicate? | Highly standardised, so replicable — and it has been replicated in variants |
| Ethics | Consent, deception, protection, right to withdraw? | Serious deception and distress; right to withdraw obscured by the prods |
The skill is not to list all six mechanically but to select the most telling ones and develop them. A developed evaluation point names the issue, explains why it matters for the conclusion, and where possible weighs it — "the androcentric sample limits generalisation to women, though the effect has since been shown across varied samples, so the situational conclusion survives the criticism". That final weighing — refusing to leave a criticism as a bare assertion — is the move that lifts an evaluation from competent to strong.
Ethics is a genuine evaluation point, not a moral aside. In OCR evaluation the marks for ethics come from linking the ethical problem to the validity or value of the study — for instance, that deception was arguably necessary for the result to be valid, which sets the scientific gain against the ethical cost. "It was unethical" on its own is a weak point; "the deception threatened informed consent but was arguably necessary to avoid demand characteristics, so there is a real tension between validity and ethics here" is a strong one.
The compare-the-pair question is the signature OCR skill in Component 02. Every classic study is paired with a contemporary counterpart on the same key theme, and you may be asked how they are similar, how they differ, and — the higher-order move — how far the contemporary study changes our understanding of the theme, including its treatment of social, individual or cultural diversity.
The pairs you are drilling here are Milgram (1963) with Bocchiaro et al. (2012) on responses to authority, and Loftus and Palmer (1974) with Grant et al. (1998) on memory. Take the authority pair. Both study responses to instruction from authority, both use a controlled procedure with a cover story, and both raise ethical questions about deception. But they differ in focus and method: Milgram studied obedience to harm a stranger, whereas Bocchiaro studied disobedience and whistle-blowing — whether people would challenge an unethical instruction and report it — and Bocchiaro added self-report and comparison groups (asking others to predict their behaviour) rather than relying on observation alone. The contemporary study updates the theme by shifting attention from why people obey to why so few resist and blow the whistle, and by showing a gap between what people predict they will do and what they actually do.
The move that distinguishes a strong comparison is running comparative threads rather than describing each study in turn. A weak answer writes a paragraph on Milgram, then a paragraph on Bocchiaro, and leaves the reader to compare. A strong answer picks threads — setting, method, what is measured, ethics, what each concludes about human nature — and weaves both studies through each thread: "Where Milgram measured behaviour directly through a rigged shock generator, Bocchiaro combined behavioural measures with self-report and prediction data, which lets it address a question Milgram could not — the mismatch between anticipated and actual conduct."
| Comparative thread | Milgram (1963) | Bocchiaro et al. (2012) |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Obedience to harm a stranger | Disobedience and whistle-blowing |
| Method | Controlled observation of behaviour | Behaviour plus self-report and comparison/prediction groups |
| Key finding | 65% obeyed to 450 volts | Few disobeyed or whistle-blew; large gap between predicted and actual conduct |
| What it adds to the theme | Establishes the power of situational authority | Reframes the question toward resistance and the prediction–action gap |
The diversity dimension is easy marks if you remember it. OCR's compare questions often reward comment on how the contemporary study changes our understanding of diversity — social, individual or cultural. Ask whether the newer study broadens the sample, tests a different culture, or reveals individual differences the classic missed. Naming that explicitly ("Bocchiaro's design surfaces individual differences in moral courage that Milgram's aggregate obedience rate obscured") converts a routine comparison into a top-band one.
Specimen question modelled on the OCR H567 paper format
Compare the study by Loftus and Palmer (1974) with the study by Grant et al. (1998). [15]
This is an extended-response comparison of the kind that appears in Component 02 Section A. A useful mark-scheme decomposition in our own words: some marks reward AO1 (accurate knowledge of both studies, deployed comparatively), and the majority reward AO3 (genuine similarities and differences developed into a judgement about how the studies relate and how far the contemporary study updates the memory theme). The organising thread must be comparison; two separate descriptions score poorly however accurate.
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