Psychology Transition Work | 2
The belated follow-up to the best-selling Psychology Transition Materials arrives “better late than never” just-in-time to provide students with lots of lovely Summer Work to stop them wasting their time relaxing, watching “That Was Rude” TikTok movies or curating their “Doesn’t Know It Yet” Instagram feeds (as I’m reliably informed the Kids do nowadays when they’re not being strictly, for their own safety, supervised).
So, if you’re looking to pick-up a few off-the-shelf transition activities so you can enjoy the warm weather rather than expend time and energy jumping through hoops to keep Senior Management happy to constructively occupy your prospective students, this might be somewhere to start.
Harris Academy Greenwich: Create a poster that illustrates a range of Issues and Debates (Free Will and Determinism, Nature – Nurture…) using suggested online resources (mainly YouTube videos).
Wilberforce 6th Form College: Getting students immediately up-to-speed, this Transition Work tastes precisely no prisoners with Literacy Task that requires students to “research the History of Psychology” and write 500 words on Psychoanalytic, Behaviourist, Social, Cognitive and Biological approaches. Once they’ve finished this there’s a Numeracy Task that involves interpreting a set of data and representing it in various mathematical ways (Bar chart, Pie chart etc.). To cap it all off, students have to choose one of four potential occupations (Clinical, Prison or Educational Psychologist, Teacher) and write 200 words on why this career would suit them.

Poole High School: This focuses on Year 12 – 13 and takes an interesting approach to Transition Work by focusing on the completion of a Revision Timetable that, I think, is designed to run for 5 weeks over the Summer (I could be wrong, but if I am I still think that’s a very good idea. You’re welcome). There’s also some suggested reading and a task involving answering three sets of Research Methods questions from previous exams. Be that as it may, it’s the structured revision material that’s most interesting and something other teachers could usefully steal. Which isn’t a phrase I find myself using very often.
Wallingford School: Three tasks of varying complexity, the first involves making posters about three classic Case Studies of individuals who suffered memory problems. The second is to conduct and document a highly-detailed Experiment “designed to test the basic concepts of long and short term memory” (and then some…). I can only think this task is an elaborate way of getting some students to self-select themselves out of Psychology, although I could, of course, be wrong. The final task (presupposing students ever finish the last one) involves finding and summarising “a piece of research you find interesting / surprising”.
King Edward 6th Lichfield: This extensive Transition Pack includes a range of Suggested Reading (from Trainspotting to Gang Leader for A Day) and some suggestions about how students could summarise their reading, plus similar stuff for films, documentaries and talks. Next up are summaries of 4 highly-influential psychological studies (Milgram, Piliavin, Loftus, Bandura). These are worth “borrowing” and using as a template for how to present further studies to your students
To round things off there’s a short glossary to complete and a link to the Tutor2u “Transition to Psychology” course – a 12-step “3 – 6 hour” course that’s free to use: you just have to sign-up with an email address and you’re ready to roll.
The Deepings School: The focus here is squarely on research methods with a major task being to work out the Aims, Procedures, Findings and Conclusions of 10 (count ‘em) classic psychological studies “many of which are on YouTube”. Students also have to note at least one strength and one weakness of each study. Next up is a couple of case studies (Genie, Oxana Malaya) where students have to list findings and conclusions and make an assessment about why we can’t generalise the findings from these studies. There are also suggestions for additional work (such as take a FutureLearn online course…) for those who are truly dedicated, love sucking-up to teachers or who have precisely zero life outside work.
Worcester Sixth Form College: The main task here is similar to that of the Deeping School – summarising the Aims, Method, Results and Conclusions of 6 classic research studies. Related tasks include answering a few questions about aspects of research methodology (what is an independent variable…) and calculating different types of average. Next up is a “watch the video, answer the questions” exercise on ethics and the work is completed by some optional tasks – listening to a range of TED talks and completing OpenLearn and FutureLearn (although the former seems rather high level for students transitioning from GCSE to A-level and the latter involves courses on mental health…). To round things off there’s a list of “psychology-related” documentaries, articles and books students can “summarise in no more than 100 words…
Etonbury Academy: The first task involves learning the Cornell Note-taking method, which is an unusual, but welcome, way to get students thinking about they take notes. This is followed by a History of Psychology exercise that involves looking at an online timeline and answering a few (10 to be precise) simple questions. The remaining exercises are all very similar: take Cornell Notes from a couple of textbook pages and then answer questions based on the Notes.
Coome Wood 6th Form: This transition work involves students watching a series of 6 YouTube videos covering things like Introducing Psychology, Social Psychology and Behaviourism and answering a few questions based on their viewing.