Top 10 Tips on How to Score Well for Science Internal Assessments
Top 10 Tips to Help You With Your IAs
1. Choosing an Idea: Choose a topic that you’re genuinely interested in.
Writing from a place of passion naturally leads you to ask novel questions and develop your thinking organically, naturally developing the personal engagement and independent thinking that examiners seek. Writing from a place of passion can also help you avoid generic and played out topics. It will also lead to unique and personal input into the topic. Most of all, it’ll help you enjoy the process of the IA like you would a personal project. Inspiration can come from many places, from your hobbies, your own explorations outside the syllabus or even from other subjects. For instance, my physics IA stemmed from a further exploration of electronics that I tinkered with in secondary school.
2. Designing Your Experiment:
Given the limitations of a school laboratory and the experiments that can be conducted reasonably, it is important to think ahead during the ideation phase so that the scope and technical requirements are feasible for a school laboratory. To accomplish this, pay special attention to the independent and dependent variables. Consider how you might adjust an independent variable such as temperature and how you would measure the dependent variable such as volume of a liquid. If measuring these variables requires equipment or a level of precision not found in your school lab, think about how you may achieve this or consider changing the variable. Its always helpful to use techniques you have already learnt in the school labs before. Looking ahead and planning can help you avoid the pain of redesigning experiments and reconducting research when you eventually realise that your experiment is unfeasible.
3. Conduct a literature review/google search using academic databases like Google Scholar
When starting an IA/EE, it's helpful to look at what's been done before. Conduct a literature review/google search using academic databases like Google Scholar. Research what other students have done in the past and think about what you have always wanted to discover. You can consider starting a google keep note to track all your random ideas. They may come in handy one day. Doing a literature review can also help you understand more about the topic or help you narrow down the research question when you find gaps in your own understanding, this also helps prevents conducting trivial and overused experiments.
4. Keep the grading rubrics by your side
The official marking standards offered by IB can be useful in guiding your IA and setting out the structure of the report. Refer to the banding criteria for each of the categories and measure against your own IA to figure out where to improve on. You can also see samples of annotated and marked IAs for clearer examples of how the rubrics are applied, these can also be found on the IB website.
5. Keep a Journal
Keep a journal that include logs of research and materials you’ve come across, your thoughts about them, your considerations at the time and rationale behind decisions you make. This helps you to remember why you did what you did each step of the way, making the report writing later much easier. Incorporate some of these thoughts in the report to help demonstrate personal engagement and active thinking (i.e explaining the rationale for each choice in the experiment). By retracing the line of research, deliberation and choices made that brought you from hypothesis to conclusion, a report that is both coherent and personally involved can be better created.
6. Starting on your report
After referencing the grading rubrics and understanding the requirements of the report, start by writing out all the necessary sections of your report. This will help you to stay organized and ensure that you don't miss any important details. Consider writing parts of your report such as introduction, variables and background information before you start experimenting. The rest of the report requires data from your experiment and can be filled in later.
7. Have a clear plan before stepping into the lab
Before stepping into the lab, have a clear plan and be familiar with your methodology. Have a plan for how you will spend your time as lab time is always limited. This is especially important If you are conducting multiple concurrent trials where things may get messy. Prepare spreadsheets beforehand so that data can be easily recorded and organised. Do also keep a keen eye for details and look out for unexpected occurrences during experimentation. Record them as qualitative data. This can serve as points of discussion for limitations and analysis and can demonstrate your critical thinking.
8. Learn to use diagrams and visuals strategically
They can often be useful to demonstrate your methodology or to explain theoretical concepts. However, they can take up precious page real estate that could be used for writing. Make effective use of them by keeping them simple and easily understandable. Tools such as shapes in words or online software specifically used for creating scientific diagrams can help you create diagrams more easily.
9. Learn to use Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs
Inputting and formatting complex formulas can be much easier with the built in tools available in Word. Annotating and drawing diagrams can also be easer in Word. Word is also generally capable of handling larger documents without lag and slowdowns, this can be especially useful during the ideation and drafting phase when page count can run on.
10. Submit your report on time
We get it, IB students have so many deadlines, often all close together. This makes everything seem overwhelming and hard to prioritise. Work on the assignments that are due first or work on those that need more time to do first. Don’t leave your work to the last minute because this often results in unchecked work and careless mistakes that could have been avoided. Try to get your report done at least 2 days before the submission deadline. Look for the naming convention (if your school has one) and rename your file before the submission deadline too. This saves you that panic the 5 minutes before the 2359 mark.
We hope that these 10 tips have helped you and your IA process in someway! This article was written by people who have completed the IBDP before you and have found the best tips and tricks to score well. If you require more help, dont hesitate to check out our IA/EE/TOK services where IBDP alumni give you personal feedback on your IAs
