PART II—FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
TIME—50 MINUTES
Directions: You have 50 minutes to answer the TWO questions that follow. Your answer should
present an argument rather than a list of facts. Make sure to incorporate psychological terminology
into your answers whenever possible.
- Two-year-old Eli dislikes green vegetables and often refuses to eat them.
(A) How could each of the following theories help explain Eli’s behavior?
■ Evolutionary psychology
■ Erikson’s psychosocial stage theory
(B) How could Eli’s parents use each of the following psychological phenomena to increase Eli’s
consumption of green vegetables?
■ Mere exposure effect
■ Eli’s lack of Piagetian conservation
■ Conformity
■ Modeling
■ Positive reinforcement
- Ten-year-old Pooja plays the trumpet. Her school band teacher assigns the students to practice at
least 20 minutes a night and to keep a log of their practice time. At her weekly group lesson at
school, Pooja notices that some students improve much more rapidly than others, and she decides
to conduct a study for the 5th grade science fair to see why that might be. She surveys the other five
students in her lesson group and finds a correlation between time spent practicing and improvement
as measured by a rating from 1 (little improvement) to 10 (tremendous improvement) that she gives
the students based on listening to their monthly playing tests. The data appear in the chart below.
Student Average Weekly Practice Time (in
hours)
Playing Test
Score (1–10)
Kevin 8 9
Amy 1 1
Ling 2 4
Daniel 4 6
Mahip 3 3
(A) ■ Draw and label a scatter plot to show this finding.
■ Describe the type of correlation Pooja found.
(B) Pooja decides to do a follow-up study in which she surveys all 42 members of her
elementary school band and rates their performance on the monthly playing tests. In addition
to asking how long they practice, Pooja asks about whether they take private lessons, how
