The Internal Assessment in Psychology

Objectives and Requirements

In your Internal Assessment (IA), you will have to:

Work as a group to create and conduct a psychological study.
Work independently to write a research report.

The main requirements are that your study must:

Be created and conducted by a group of 2-4 people in total.
Be related to a recognized psychological theory or model (one that has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal).
Be an experiment (no other research method can be used).
Only involve 1 independent variable (2 conditions) and 1 dependent variable.
Be in line with IB ethical requirements.
- For instance, studies involving physical or psychological harm, extensive deception, or conformity are not acceptable.
- Students may also not study animals or young children (unless they obtain parental consent).
Be presented and evaluated in an individual report that follows a particular template and is around 2000-word long.

How to Use this Step-by-Step Guide

This step-by-step guide will help you create an appropriate study as a group, and then write an individual IA report that does not only meet all IB requirements, but also the highest grading standards. If needed, it will help you conduct your experiment online.

For this first module “Create Your Experiment”, you should read each step in its entirety, and then answer the corresponding Questions.

Because your experiment is a group project, you should collaborate with your partners to find the answers. However, when writing the answers in your Experiment Creation Form, you must work independently from each other. You may NOT write answers as a group or share written answers, as this would be a case of academic dishonesty.