DoRevision
Teacher guide

Edexcel GCSE Psychology revision for teachers

These activities are mapped to Edexcel GCSE Psychology 1PS0. Eleven of them, sixteen to twenty minutes each. Psychology differs from every other subject on this site in what its content actually is. A physics topic describes how the world behaves. A psychology topic describes what a particular researcher found, when, and by what method. Students are learning claims with names attached: Piaget and the three mountains, Bartlett on reconstructive memory, Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model, Zimbardo's prison study, Gibson against Gregory. That changes what revision has to carry. The finding, the person and the method travel together, because a question about a study is a question about the evidence for it. These eleven cover the studies. They are lighter on the argument about them, which is set out below.

This page lists what we actually have for Edexcel GCSE Psychology 1PS0. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.

Claims with names attached

Ask a Geography student what they know and you get how a thing works. Ask a Psychology student and the honest answer is a list of people and what they showed.

That is not a quirk of teaching, it is what the subject is. The multi-store model is not a fact about memory, it is a model proposed by two named researchers that later work partly undermined. The Stanford prison study is not a finding about human nature, it is one study, with a design that would not be approved today, which is exactly why it is worth arguing about.

So a student has three things to remember about every study rather than one: what it claimed, who claimed it, and how they went about it. Drop the method and the answer has nothing to stand on. Drop the name and the student cannot point to the evidence at all.

Our activities are built around that pairing: the study and the way it was done, together, rather than a bare list of conclusions.

What the eleven cover

Nine cover compulsory content, which is most of the course every student sits:

  • Development, two activities, on Piaget and on Dweck and Willingham.
  • Memory, one, on reconstructive memory and the multi-store model.
  • Psychological problems, one, on explanations for depression and addiction.
  • The brain and neuropsychology, one, on structure, lateralisation and neuron function.
  • Social influence, two, on conformity and obedience, and on deindividuation and the Stanford prison study.
  • Research methods, two, on design, sampling and ethics, and on data analysis.

Two cover Perception, which is one of five optional topics. If your centre teaches different options, those two are not yours, and the other four options have no activities here at all.

Where these are light

Knowing a study is the easier half of Psychology. The harder half is what a student says about it: whether the sample supports the claim, whether the method could produce that result by accident, whether it would be run today.

Three of the eleven activities use the language of evaluation at all, and the sustained material on ethics, sampling and validity sits inside the research methods activity rather than beside each study. That is a real gap and worth planning around: use these to secure the studies, and keep the critique work in your own lessons where a discussion can happen.

It is also why the research methods pair is the most valuable thing here for a class that already knows the studies.

Our own position on how research evidence should be described, including what a study does not show, is on the evidence page. It is written for teachers rather than students, but a Psychology class is being taught the same discipline.

Using them

The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. The activities themselves, with the recall goal spelled out, are described in ready-to-run revision activities.

The data analysis activity is the only one here asking for a produced number rather than a selection. If you also teach the statistics course, or your students do, Edexcel GCSE Statistics covers the same territory in far more depth.

To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint. Everything else we have, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.

What this page does not do

It is light on evaluation, which is where the harder marks are. Three of eleven touch it.

It covers one optional topic of five. Perception only. If your centre chose differently, treat this as a page about the compulsory core.

Eleven activities across a two-year course make a supplement, not a scheme of work.

It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.

Every live Psychology activity for Edexcel

11 activities, all mapped to Pearson Edexcel GCSE Psychology (1PS0).

See all 11, by topic

Try it with your class

Edexcel Psychology 16 minutes

Reconstructive Memory and the Multi-Store Model

14 steps, 9 interactive, 6 activity types.

Best used for
Homework Independent study Intervention
  • Homework: Set it as a link. It marks itself.
  • Independent study: Explains before it asks, so a student can work alone.
  • Intervention: Mostly questions, so it finds the gap quickly.

Try one question

In the multi-store model, what moves information from the sensory register into short-term memory?

Edexcel Psychology 17 minutes

Deindividuation and the Stanford Prison Experiment

14 steps, 10 interactive, 8 activity types.

Best used for
Homework Intervention
  • Homework: Set it as a link. It marks itself.
  • Intervention: Mostly questions, so it finds the gap quickly.

Try one question

What does deindividuation mean?

Edexcel Psychology 19 minutes

Research Design, Sampling and Ethics

14 steps, 9 interactive, 8 activity types.

Best used for
Homework Independent study
  • Homework: Set it as a link. It marks itself.
  • Independent study: Explains before it asks, so a student can work alone.

Try one question

Researchers test whether drinking caffeine changes people's reaction time. What is the independent variable?

Common questions

What is actually being revised in Psychology?

Claims attached to names. Piaget and the three mountains task, Bartlett on reconstructive memory, Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model, Zimbardo's prison study, Gibson against Gregory on perception. A student has to hold the finding, the person and the method together, which is a different kind of remembering from most subjects.

Do these cover the whole course?

The compulsory part, nearly. Nine of the eleven cover the five compulsory Paper 1 topics and the compulsory research methods topic. The other two cover Perception, which is one of five optional topics, so if your centre teaches different options those two will not apply.

Do they cover evaluating the studies?

Not much, and this is the honest gap. Three of the eleven use the language of evaluation at all, and the sustained ethics and validity material sits in the research methods activity rather than alongside each study. Knowing a study is the easier half.

Is there any maths in it?

Yes, in one activity. Data analysis and descriptive statistics is the only one asking students to produce a numerical answer, which reflects a course that examines research methods in their own right.

How long are they?

Eleven activities, sixteen to twenty minutes each, so one fits a homework slot or the end of a lesson rather than a full period.

Will I see who has completed them?

No. Following a shared link records nothing about who followed it, which is a deliberate choice about children's data.

Put one in front of a class

Tell us the subject and how long you have. You get a link to hand out, and it marks itself.

Create a free teacher account

Written by David Wright, Co-Founder, DoRevision.

David builds DoRevision with his son Noah (15). David has spent his career building EdTech products, and Noah has grown up watching lines of code being written. As a student at an important stage of his education, together they are building the revision platform that Noah is using to help revise for his GCSE exams and hopes his friends will find useful too.

Spotted an error on this page? [email protected]

How DoRevision writes its teacher material How DoRevision uses evidence and cites sources

Related for teachers

  • Edexcel GCSE Statistics revision for teachers Every live Edexcel GCSE Statistics (1ST0) revision activity. The specification carries one topic that is not content at all, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of a student's revision pays off.
  • How DoRevision uses evidence and cites sources The rules DoRevision follows when a teacher page makes a claim: what gets a citation, how we label our own data, and the claims we won't make at all. Written so you can check our working.
  • Ready-to-run GCSE revision activities A working list of GCSE revision activities, each with the thing it makes students recall, the moment they find out whether they were right, and what they do about it. Some run on a screen and some need nothing but a board.