TIPS ON 10 MARK QUESTION?

[lleeea]

Hi all,

is there any formula for smashing out a 10 mark question on the psych exam? can someone pls give step by step instructions on how to approach a 10 mark question? any other useful tips?

[Bri MT]

There's no formula but here here are some tips:

- look at the prompt, and underline the key words/phrases   (you should have 3-4 ish underlined things)
- from each of those key words, jot down a few dotpoints of things you could talk about.
- pick the best 2-4 of those dotpoints for each, and they'll guide your paragraph/s.

eg. "Pretend you are writing a brochure about mental health, risk factors and how patients can improve their resillience to mental health disorders"

-> "Pretend you are writing a brochure about mental health, social risk factors and how patients can improve their resilience to mental health disorders. Emphasise the role of continuums."

Mental health
- Mental health continuum
- What is mental wellbeing
- Biopsychosocial approach

Social risk factors:
- Predisposing (eg. attachment as an infant)
- Precipitating (eg. loss of a loved one)
- Perpetuating (eg. stigma)

use protective risk factor to transition into talking about resilience

Resilience
- protective factor
- variable/not fixed
- role of social networks ( inc. resilience)
- access to information (inc resilience)


"Mental Health
Mental health is best expressed as a continuum which ranges from a state of being mentally healthy, to having a mental health problem, to having a mental health disorder. Our place on this continuum changes over our lifespan, and there are no clear boundaries between each of the categories. Being mentally healthy is more than just the absence of mental illness, it also means....."


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Hope this helps

[sdfg]

Hey lleeea,

Don't know if you know about this yet, but this is the criteria VCAA outlined in the exam specifications for 10 markers that aren't split into parts.

- identification and explanation of formal psychological terminology relevant to the question
- use of appropriate psychology terminology
- discussion of relevant psychological information, ideas, concepts, theories and/or models and the connections between them
- analysis and evaluation of data, methods and scientific models
- drawing of evidence-based conclusions and explanation of limitations of conclusions

With regards to tips, the main one my teacher (a VCAA examiner) gave us was to explain things as if you were teaching something to a 5 year old. Obviously still with the language and technical terms that you would expect from a year 12 Psychology student, but assume that the person you're explaining things to doesn't know a thing about whatever you're talking about and so you need to break things down and explain it in the most simple way possible. The 10 marker is an opportunity to flaunt your understanding to the examiner and the best way to do this is to in essence 'teach' your examiner (cause before you can teach something effectively, you need to fully understand it first).

**This advice obviously won't be applicable to all 10 markers though - probably more applicable to 10 markers akin to the ones in the sample and 2017 exam.