Updated for AQA 2025 Spec – Teaching from SEPTEMBER 2025 onwards

This resource is designed for teaching The Cognitive Approach to Explaining Depression under the AQA A-Level Psychology (2025 Specification). It has been fully updated to reflect the revised requirements within the Clinical Psychology and Mental Health topic, which expect students to describe, apply, and evaluate Beck’s cognitive theory and Ellis’s ABC model as explanations of depression, including key concepts such as negative schemas, faulty information processing, the negative triad, irrational beliefs, and activating events.

If you’re looking for the 2019 specification version of this topic, please visit my shop.

This fully editable lesson guides students through Beck’s and Ellis’s cognitive explanations, supporting the development of secure AO1 knowledge through clear explanations, structured notes, and visual diagrams. Students then apply the theories to real-world examples and case material, before developing AO3 evaluation skills through guided discussion, structured activities, and critical comparison tasks.

What’s Included:

Fully Editable Lesson Slides – Introduce Beck’s and Ellis’s cognitive explanations of depression through clear explanations, diagrams, structured note sections, and worked examples. Includes retrieval starters, success criteria, Think–Pair–Share questions, scenario prompts, guided reading, discussion activities, application checkpoints, and a structured plenary.

AO2 Application Worksheet – Students apply cognitive theory to a real-life scenario involving Yasmin’s redundancy, identifying activating events, irrational beliefs, consequences, and cognitive vulnerabilities. Designed to build confidence with exam-style application questions.

Evaluation Worksheet – Printable activity enabling students to examine key strengths and limitations of the cognitive explanations, including research support, CBT effectiveness, explanatory breadth, cognitive primacy, and developmental influences. Features classification prompts, explanation boxes, and stretch questions to support higher-level reasoning.

Exam Practice Question Sheet – Includes a 4-mark AO1 question assessing students’ ability to describe one cognitive explanation of depression, with clear response space suited for classwork, homework, or formative assessment.

How This Resource Reflects the 2025 Specification Changes:

• Fully aligned with AQA 2025 content under Clinical Psychology and Mental Health
• Covers updated sub-topic: The Cognitive Approach to Explaining Depression
• Supports AO1, AO2, and AO3 objectives through explanation, application, and evaluation
• Incorporates scenario-based reasoning and clinical examples, as emphasised in the revised specification
• Suitable for classroom teaching, independent learning, cover lessons, homework, or revision

All materials are fully editable, allowing teachers to adapt the lesson to student ability, pacing, and teaching style.