How to Ace Your Psych IA: Step-By-Step

The Psychology Internal Assessment (IA) is one of the most challenging components of the IB for many students, however doing well in this IA requires you following very straightforward steps. By going very thoroughly and methodologically through the requirements of the IB criteria and this list of sentence by sentence guidance, you are definitely on your way to acing the Psych IA and getting that idolised 7. While these steps can be adjusted and more can be added to your own IA as this assignment is different for every student and study, I have tried to make each step as basic as possible so anyone can do well on their Psych IA (even if you have a bad teacher or are just very confused!)

I have spent many hours compiling together guidance for every section of the Psych IA, the appropriate amount of sentences and paragraphs for each section, and what they should individually cover and how. As such, I have split this guide into 2 parts, where one is Planning Your Psychology IA and the other is Writing Your Psychology IA. In the second part, the paragraphs and what to include in each are listed in chronological order. Therefore, they should be included in the order they are stated.

If you have anything to add to this post, suggestions or questions, let me know in the comment section and I will answer as soon as possible!

Disclaimer: This article isn't written by an IB examiner or any professional, just a student who has gone through the IB and wants to help others get a good mark! To do so, I've looked at different resources that will help you if you are struggling to wrap your head around what exactly needs to be covered in the IA. It's not foolproof, but should be able to give you lots of guidance!
Planning Your Psychology IA

Finding the right study for your IA:

Finding the right time frame for your study:

Finding an experiment that no one else is doing and is clear enough to follow is always kinda difficult for any Psych student. You might stumble across studies that others are doing, or might find hyper specific studies with complicated terminology you've never seen before. One of the main issues I came across when writing my IA was the age of the study. I recommend that you find a recent study rather than one done before the 1980s, for example. Chances are, more recent studies have plenty of valid theory behind it and the methodology that you can follow is much more precise than older studies.

I had a study for my Psych IA that was pretty much a pioneer in its field and was conducted in the 1970s. This meant there was virtually no preceding theory or studies, and the researchers couldn't really compare itself to other research in the paper. This proved to be an issue that could have easily been curbed if we'd just looked at recent, simpler studies on well-known phenomena with lots of theory behind it already.

Knowing what statistical testing was used:

The study my IA was based on was one where the 'sign test' was used and this is not a good testing method for IA writing students. It requires a specific type of environment with certain results from your study, and isn't a robust method to analyse data with.

Each statistical test that's created is an improvement from the previous ones, and this is a very old test. Therefore, try to stick with studies using the well-known "t-test" so you don't have to worry about this being a problem when you yourself try to compare results and are forced to use another statistical technique.

Understanding the theoretical background:

You will be marked according to your connection of the study you've found to a specific named theoretical background and further the replication you plan to do. Therefore, you should introduce them in the given order below.

Understanding that being able to make this connection between the 3 main elements of your study requires you first fully grasping what theory the chosen study is based on. If you find a really old study (ie. one from the 1950s), it might not be based on theory but may actually be generating theory. This will be difficult to discuss in terms of theoretical context since it didn't really exist before that study took place. 

One of the fundamental things to understand from this point is that you must have a clear "theory" stated in your IA that is linked to your chosen study, and thus your replication. If your study, for some reason, does not have a clear theory behind it, try to avoid it and look for something with a clearly stated heuristic or bias, for example. 

What to do before conducting the study

Here are some major things every Psych student needs to consider when doing the replication once they've figured out what study they're going to replicate.

Writing a list of ALL materials you will use 

Before starting, gather together with your group and meticulously plan every step of how you will use ALL materials needed. This includes props (ie. basketballs, presentations, recorded audio) and regular materials (ie. computers, pens, chairs, etc.). 

This is to ensure that, if your group needs to be split amongst classes to conduct the experiment, every one of you use the exact same materials. You can use this act of controlling the standardisation of researchers' procedure for every condition/group as a strength in your study. This is discussed in the evaluation section below.

Write a step-by-step tutorial for EVERY step of your study

There is a section later in the IA where you need to list, in super simple words and numbered steps, how you conducted experiment (Section 3: Exploration). This should be so clear that any person reading your IA should be able to conduct the study in the exact same way without missing any step. Before you start, gather your group to create this step-by-step tutorial including every stage of ur experiment. Not only does this make your job 10x easier later on, you've also completed 1 whole section for your IA without having even done the study yet.

Brainstorm how you will gather participants

You will have to communicate with teachers and students to be able to get participants for your study. You need to sort out:

• how many participants you need 
• how many conditions you need for your chosen experimental design
• which classes you can/can't interrupt
• what times your group can do the study during the school day
• which teachers you need to communicate with in advance about what time suits them

Your group needs to look at potential classes they can interrupt and discuss with the class's teacher what time would suit them best. You can't barge into a class and start the experiment, even if that sounds tempting and time-saving!

Clearly identify your IV* and DV**

*IV=Independent Variable
**DV=Dependent Variable

Understanding WHAT you are actually manipulating is crucial to your IA. You need to make it very clear what is the 1 thing you are changing, and what is the thing that will be affected. Many students skip this step, and this costs them once they sit down, start writing their IA and finally realise that what they were testing is not what they are claiming they're studying. If you get caught in this trap, you will lose points.



Writing Your Psychology IA

Title Page

Title: Psychology Internal Assessment

Subtitle: Focus of your own study

Word count:

This should not be more than 2000 words and excludes:

• Title page
• References
• Section headings
• Parenthetical citations
• Graphs
• Appendices

Session you will do your final exams (ie. May 2020)

Your personal code

Personal codes of other students in your group

Here's an example of what your Psych IA Title Page could look like:

1st section: Table of Contents

This includes the page numbers for:

• table of contents (optional but preferred)
• introduction
• exploration
• analysis
• evaluation
• works cited
• include individual page numbers for each appendix

You should always keep in mind these change continually when you edit the document, so you need to regularly check the correct page numbers are being used in the table of contents. If this isn't followed up on at multiple points of the process (especially at the end), there's a chance you could lose easy points for organisation.

This can look something like this:

2nd section: Introduction

This section is meant to provide an overview of what study you've chosen, what the theoretical background behind the original study is, and what your replicated study will be like. Talking about the theory and original study should be in past tense. When you talk about your replication of the study, this should be written in future tense as you will be conducting the study. Even if you've already done the replicated study, this should still be in future tense.

1st paragraph: 

You need to briefly explain the theory your chosen study is based on.

2nd paragraph: 

You should explicitly connect the theory to the study you've chosen

3rd longer paragraph:

In this paragraph, you should be giving the reader insight into what the study is about, and what it concluded. This should include a brief explanation of

• why you chose this specific study
• what happens inside original study in very basic detail
• results from original study

4th paragraph: 

The 4th paragraph is finally the section you talk about your own replication of the chosen study. This should include:

• 1 sentence stating explicitly what you aim to determine in your replicated study
• 1-2 sentences stating clearly the IV and DV of your replication

5th paragraph:

This paragraph should be an opportunity to demonstrate "why this replication of the original study is important" in around 3-5 sentences. Think of this as an exercise to show "what's the point of all of this? Why bother?" The most essential but more 'fancy' question that professional researchers would ask themselves is "What could this replication do for scientific research within psychology? What could this possibly give us? Why invest the time and money into doing this?"

If you're not sure why your replication is "important", fear not. Basically no Psych student really knows why except to complete the dreaded task of a Psych IA. Unfortunately, though, you gotta think like a real psychology researcher and come up with a legitimate reason for doing this study.

To help you figure this out, consider how the following concepts might be different in the original study and your replicated study:

• the timeframe the original study was done in. If it was done long ago, are there certain things that may be different nowadays that may influence how participants respond to the same experiment?
• the cultural context of the original study and how that's different from your own
• the difference in age between the participants of the original study and IB students
• you could talk about how replicating the original study with teenagers/international students/academically motivated people might provide insight into ______
• the gender of the participants in the original study versus those in your replication
• technological differences between the original study and your replication (would exposure to technology yield different results, or do the results also stand in this different setting as well (this is known as transferability)
• think about if the experiment originally conducted was highly artificial. Consider how the artificial nature of the study could have influenced the results, and how replicating your study in a more natural environment, like a classroom, is beneficial (again, this is referring to transferability)

In my own Psych IA, I stated that replication of the original study was important since the original study is very old. Therefore, we want to test if the results stand the test of time generally (in that testing this heuristic using the method they did is still a valid method). Additionally, we also said that, based on this, the exposure of teenagers to certain named influences (such as mobile phones and television) may be different than the original sample in the timeframe they did the test. This is because, in the 1970s, there wasn't such massive exposure to technological devices as there is today, and this could influence major elements of the study. This is known as the temporal validity of the study, and is good to use as a reason for replication for very old studies (like my own).

6th paragraph: 

This is a short paragraph where 2 essential sentences are included:

• 1 sentence clearly stating the research hypothesis. In this sentence, you should clearly identify clearly the IV and DV stated earlier
• 1 sentence clearly stating the null hypothesis

3rd section: Exploration

This section is meant to detail the steps you took to conduct your replicated study from start to finish.

1st paragraph:

This is a paragraph that sets the scene for the reader. It is used so that you can go through the basic structural details of your study before you actually conducted it. 

This must include:

• 1 sentence must name what research design was used and what this means in terms of your study. For instance, you need to name that you used independent samples design, where participants were put into 2 groups and assigned to different conditions.

• 2 sentences, explain what your conditions to test your variables are. If you have independent samples:
• 1 sentence would be used to explain exactly what your experimental condition is
• 1 sentence would be used to explain exactly what your control condition is

• 1 sentence clearly stating the type of sampling method you chose and who the participants are. Most often students use opportunity sampling of IB students aged between specified ages.

• 1 sentence stating where these participants were gathered from (ie. 3 pre-existing groups attending different English classes).

Why I included the term "pre-existing" is that there may be certain characteristics you can discuss later about how these groups may have varied abilities within English, for instance. If your replicated study is about spelling, then this is vital in understanding how sampling biases may have influenced your results due to your participants belonging to predetermined groups with potentially different levels of knowledge of English.

2nd paragraph:

This paragraph is made up of 4-7 sentences, which are meant to explain if there were certain measures you undertook to replicate certain key elements of the study. Make this process clear and separate for the different conditions of your study, with the experimental condition(s) coming first and control(s) coming second, if you have controls.

In my own Psych IA, this was a paragraph explaining how we created a presentation of famous peoples' faces, wherein everything from timing to the audio we recorded to the specific faces we chose were justified with explicit explanations.

Ideally include 1 sentence explaining if you did a pilot study, for what reason, and how this may have influenced your official replicated study. If you did one or multiple pilot studies and some came up with insignificant or unusable results (like in my own Psych IA), these don't need to be included. 

3rd and 4th paragraph:

As mentioned earlier, you should have created a very basic and clear step-by-step tutorial as to how you did each part of the study. At the beginning, keep this step-by-step tutorial explicit and slowly cut down on the absolutely non-essential elements to it. Keeping as much as possible of your steps is important, but you also can't afford to use too many words explaining what you did. Therefore, cut any "fluffy" phrases and try to combine sentences where you can.

You also need to include basic materials used in ALL Psych IA studies. This includes reference to giving and receiving the Consent Forms, reading or handing out Standardised Instructions, and reference to a Debrief being given to participants. All documents referenced in this section must be put in the Appendix at the end of your IA. Therefore, when you mention any in this section, they must be labelled by what Appendix number the person reading your IA can look at to know what you're talking about.

• When you reference the first piece of material, you can reference it in this way: The participants returned their consent forms (see Appendix 1).
• Once you've referenced your first appendix, you can just include the appendix without "see" as this is now understood by the researcher after it came up the first time: The participants were debriefed (Appendix 5).

4th section: Analysis

If you use outlier analysis:

(this is relevant if you see a few responses/results that deviate massively from everyone else)

• 1 sentence would be used to explain why you used outlier analysis
• 1-2 sentences explaining how outlier analysis was conducted. To do so, my group found a math tutorial for statistics students and explained briefly how we followed it.

Include your 1st Table

This table should be labelled something like "Table 1: Descriptive analysis of data" above it.This table should show the most crucial parts of the data from your study. This usually includes the mean (M) and the standard deviation (SD) for each of your conditions, as well as other relevant data if necessary. Keep in mind that every piece of data presented in the table must be discussed, which means using extra words. Therefore, try to include only the most important data values. 

The table MUST follow the APA citation guide for tables.

Paragraph underneath Table 1

State the differences between data values (ie. the mean in one condition may be a bit lower than the other condition). If there is a difference in standard deviation, you can talk about the fact there is greater variance in the responses of participants to the different conditions. Therefore, you could state that in one condition, participants may have been more unsure than in the other of how to respond, for instance. Try look at your own study, and try explain what could possibly cause the spread of responses to be larger in one condition. In every point and statement you make, explicitly state the numbers seen in the table.

Include your 1st figure

This figure show the most important comparison of data (ie. different mean responses in each condition). Creating this figure must follow APA guidelines and usually is shown using a bar chart as this is super clear for the reader. However, this can be also done with a line chart or something similar if that's more appropriate for your study.

To create this graph, you don't need anything fancy. Both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have good, clear chart making programs that are used most commonly by IB students every year.

Paragraph underneath figure

This is a paragraph that is meant to analyse the table and figure shown above. This should include:

• 1 sentence stating you conducted a certain statistical test (most commonly used among IB students is the "t-test") and what it was used to compare.
  
  For example, "An independent samples t-test was conducted to compare _____ in the experimental condition and _______ in the control condition." A very good and commonly used t-test website calculator is VassarStats. You just plug in the raw data of your 2 conditions (if you're using independent samples) and it generates all you need for this paragraph. Look at this website with your Psych teacher if you're confused about what the different terms mean as there are many different calculations done on the website so it can initially be confusing.

• 1 sentence stating if there was a statistically significant difference in data in conditions or not.
  
  
  In essence, this statement should look something like this:

  "The t-test showed there was (not) a significant difference in the responses for those in the experimental condition (M=?, SD=?) and those in the control condition (M=?, SD=?); t(?)=?, p=?."
  
  If p-value is smaller than 0.01, your results are considered significant. If you have statistically significant results, you can state that you are able to reject the null hypothesis. If you have statistically insignificant results, you can state that you are not able to reject the null hypothesis.
  Don't give up at this point if you have statistically insignificant results! This does not mean your hard work went to waste or that what you initially thought about your study was wrong. There are still many things you can talk about in terms of the mean and standard deviation if there are interesting differences! :)

• 1 sentence stating what accepting/rejecting the null hypothesis means in terms of your actual study. You can start the sentence with something like "This means that..." or "That is, it appears..."

5th section: Evaluation

This section primarily covers what you found out about your study and gives you the opportunity to look at how it's different from and similar to the original study. Not only that, but it acts as a time for you to reflect on what you could've done better and what could be done in future research to counter any limitations you came across.

1st paragraph

This paragraph should provide an overview of what your analysis and findings means in terms of your study. This should include

• 1 sentence stating if your results do or don't support the original study's findings. Supporting the original study doesn't necessarily mean you need to have a significant p-value, but it can be shown through similar trends in terms of the mean and standard deviation.
• 1 sentence stating the p-value of the original study
• 1 sentence stating what this meant in terms of the study
• 1 sentence comparing the p-value of the original study to your own p-value
• if your results are statistically insignificant, include 1 sentence referencing the mean/standard deviation and how either or both of these might still support the original study's findings

2nd and 3rd paragraph

These paragraphs are meant to summarise key strengths and limitations in your study. These can be due to your own actions as researchers or may naturally occur.

• 2-3 identified strengths in your study and with each identified strength, 1 sentence explaining in what way this strength was created or how it positively impacted your study. This can refer to using pilot studies, usage of standardised intervals between certain parts of the study, controls for specific biases, etc.
• 2-3 identified major limitations in your study and with each identified limitation, 1 sentence explaining in what way this strength was weakened your study. This can refer to using not controlling for specific relevant biases, issues with the sample, etc.

For each limitation, come up with 1 realistic potential solution that could've been implemented in future research. 

As a general note, ideally intertwine the strengths and limitations. This will demonstrate an in-depth understanding of your study. Intertwining can be done through identifying 1 element of your study, like the study's sample. You can find 1 strength and 1 limitation in using the specific sample you had and how these could have influenced the results of the study.

IMPORTANT! You should identify strengths and limitations by covering different parts of your IA equally. This includes making reference to your sampling technique, what kind of participants you gathered, the materials you used, and the experimental design you used.

4th paragraph

This paragraph is meant to be an opportunity to summarise your most important findings and wrap your IA up. In this paragraph, you should include:

• 1 sentence stating that you can/can't reject the null hypothesis
• 1 sentence stating what this result means in terms of your study
• 1 sentence stating a concluding statement starting with something like "From this study, we can conclude that..."

6th section: Works Cited

This section includes all the works you referenced, theory your study is based on and where possible images/names/letters you've used are from. These need to be done in APA style (American Psychological Association) and in alphabetical order.


7th section: Appendices

What to include:

In this section, you need to include all documents and material shown to participants. This includes things such as your debrief, standardised instructions, and consent form. Along with this, your study will most likely include showing certain materials (such as faces, lists of letters, pictures, etc.) and these also need to be included in the appendices. Essentially, anyone wanting to do your study exactly the same way again should be able to look at this section and have every piece of material specific to the study available to them.

The appendix must also include screenshots of the statistical calculator you used to arrive at your results seen in Section 4: Analysis. I took screenshots of my results in the t-test used on the VassarStats website. I took screenshots of ALL of the page with the results included.

You need to include raw data for each condition as well in this section. This refers to all of the numbers that look a bit complicated and messy that you based your results on. Put this into clear-ish tables so anyone reading the IA can still get a gist of what the numbers are meant to refer to.

What order do the appendices go in?

Order the appendices according to the order in which they are mentioned in Section 3: Exploration. If there are materials not mentioned in the section, include them after the named appendices in whatever order seems most logical to you.

What happens if one of my appendices overlap into multiple pages?

No stress, if your material (such as screenshots of your t-test) go over 2-3 pages, you don't need to make your appendix super small to fit into 1 page. Make sure that each page of this section only has the information of 1 appendix. This means there should be no pages where 2 or more appendices overlap. Here's what you should avoid:

By looking at this document, you can see that 2 different appendices are included on 1 page. Don't do this!

Instead of doing this, you should instead separate all of you appendices even if it makes your IA very long. It makes your information very clear to anyone reading the IA, and if you don't do this you could lose easy points for organisation. Here's what you should be doing with appendices:

If you follow all of these steps from start to finish, you should be well on your way to getting a 7 in your Psych IA. If you have any questions or concerns, please comment down below and I'll try answer them. If you found this post useful, feel free to share it with friends and classmates so that they can get an idea of how they can complete their Psych IA with step-by-step instructions. If you've read up until here, I warmly recommend reading my other posts as they cover all sorts of assignments you'll do throughout the IB! Otherwise, check back to this website to see regular updates and new posts on the curriculum and other IB components that could be useful to you :)