The IB ESS IA is a simple assignment that students can complete in a short time. However, almost every student we’ve interacted with have had significant difficulties understanding what was required of them, only to discover at the last minute that their idea was deemed unsuitable for the subject.
In this systematic approach, we will walk you through all the prerequisites to get a 7 on your ESS IA. This section will walk you through the critical aspects of your IA, including the necessary sections and examples.
To assist you with keeping track, your ESS IA should be in seven sections, excluding the Title Page. These sections are:
- Introductory
- Strategic Planning
- Methods
- Data Collection and Processing
- Statistical Analysis
- Conclusions and Recommendations
- Appendix
We’ll look at each section in more details in this guide.
IB ESS IA Outline Explained
To get a 7 in an IB ESS IA assignment, you need to understand the structure of the project. Also, you need to know exactly what to include in each section.
Title Page
The following is a checklist of the items that you should include in the title page of your IB ESS IA.
- Header: Internal Assessment of Environmental Systems and Societies
- Your IA’s title (this should be only a few words long)
- Research Proposal
- Total number of words: It is limited to 2250 words and does not include headings for figures or tables, references, bibliographies, appendices, or any data included inside a table.
- Individual code
Introduction
This section introduces the environmental issue you’re addressing and the question you’re attempting to answer. You should divide it into three distinct section:
1. Research Question (RQ)
This question should be highly relevant to the research you are performing. Your research question may change as you perform and analyze your study, but make sure that references in your IA to your RQ are same throughout.
2. Environmental Concern
Your teacher will grade your IB ESS IA based on your ability to tie your work to a specific global or local issue. So this section should define one issue that the study claims to address.
Consider the environmental challenges you’ve seen in the news or, even better, look at your own life to see if there are any changes to the environment that you might research on a local level. If possible, substantiate this section with relevant research that demonstrates the critical nature of the topic.
3. Location Justification
While it may be tempting, you cannot simply declare that the location in which you conducted your research was the only option open to you.
To earn points, you must discuss the significance of the subject you’ve picked in your location. You must provide an explanation that considers alternate justifications for your selections and they must appear logical to any researcher who reads your study.
Strategic Planning
This section should provide a foundation for future research by outlining the materials utilized, the controls necessary, and the variables controlled.
The section must include:
- A table listing the experimental variables and the conditions under which they were controlled.
- The materials you utilized in your research. This can be anything from pens to computers, rulers to calculators.
- Include a clear statement that communicates the expectation for the study. There should be 1-2 sentences defending the hypothesis.
- Ethical concerns: Incorporate ethical issues into both a questionnaire and an experimental investigation.
Methods
What you explain in this part is very dependent on the type of IA you use and the degree to which experiments and questionnaires are separated.
Both options will need an entirely different technique.
If you conduct an experiment, record the phases and materials used in the same manner that you would in your scientific disciplines.
No subjects utilize questionnaires for their IAs, but there are components that you must include if you want to use one. Based on my own experience creating a questionnaire, the following are the important elements so that your IB ESS IA covers all the bases.
Formulation of Pertinent Questions
Clarify the purpose of your survey and explain how you intend to tailor all questions to the research question that you’ve supplied.
Organize your questionnaire into parts, each with a distinct objective that provides specialized information. You can divide your questionnaire into three sections:
- The first of which will solicit participants’ thoughts on Subject X
- The second of which will solicit academic questions on Subject X
- The third of which will solicit participants’ family members’ perspectives on Subject X.
Discussing Participants’ Response
You should provide information on how participants responded to your study’s questions.
Each questionnaire is unique and has unique criteria for obtaining the best possible data, which is why determining the optimal alternatives might be challenging at times. Whatever you choose, you must include an explanation – or a screenshot.
You must provide at least one screenshot sample from the survey in order for the reader of the IA to get a sense of how the scale was perceived in practice by participants.
Mention Calculations Performed
You can work on this section after you’ve examined the raw data and considered how you can present it in your analysis. Include the calculations only if you provide your data in percentages to facilitate interpretation or if you’re comparing typical replies.
You must demonstrate the fundamental mathematical processes you followed to present something in percentage/mean form.
Justifications for Selections
Justification of selection is a critical component of questionnaire-based and experimental IA. It’s a technique used to articulate all of the reasons for your actions and may include but not limited to the:
- Factors that influenced your decision to choose a particular answer scale for your questionnaire
- Reasons why did you selected a certain location for your responses
- Reasons why you selected a certain age group to participate in the questionnaire
You can go the extra mile to generate responses to questions not yet been asked by the teacher or your classmates.
This is an opportunity to cover all bases and ensure that readers can see any gaps in your study as deliberate choices. You must tread carefully and ensure that you complete this section properly, as it can either set you up for disaster or for success.
Data Collection and Processing
Data collection and processing section should contain your Raw Data, a relevant table that explains the statistics represent, and a few figures that illustrate the findings.
Unprocessed Data
Present your raw data in this section’s first table. The table contains all of the extremely disorganized data that is impossible to interpret on its own. The table can and most likely will span multiple pages, so don’t be alarmed if your raw data exceeds three pages!
Data Processing
You have the option of presenting this raw data in the form of additional tables or figures.
For trials, ESS IAs often rely on calculations or line graphs, whereas questionnaire IAs rely more on pie charts, bar charts, or tables to convey results.
Statistical Analysis
In this section, you will summarize significant findings from your investigation and explain the probable causes for these findings.
You should divide the statistical analysis section into two parts:
- The first section should analyzes the facts provided in the previous section
- The second is the actual conclusion reached as a result of this analysis
Anything you express in the second section should be clear in the first section. You must guide the reader through the aspects of your data, and show how you reached your conclusion.
Recognizing Trends
Before you begin writing this part in its entirety, review the data you’ve obtained and create a dot-point list of all the tendencies you see.
Each paragraph should:
- You identify one significant trend.
- State the statistics that substantiate the assertion that this trend occurs.
- Give a probable explanation for why this trend exists.
- Determine the most intriguing, maybe contradictory, tendencies you’ve discovered in the replies that support your theory.
If you are conducting an experiment, omit this section because your outcomes are mostly decided by their statistical significance. When conducting a questionnaire, the point at which you can confidently assert that your hypothesis has been verified is somewhat ambiguous.
Separate this section into two to make it easier to unpack. One paragraph should summarize the most significant developments that directly address your RQ, and it should conclude with a statement expressing whether the evidence supports the hypothesis.
The second paragraph can shed more light on why a hypothesis is accepted/rejected and what this entails in practice. You may apply your data-driven knowledge to real-world situations.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The conclusion and recommendations section requires you to exercise your critical thinking skills by examining the good, the bad, and the ugly in your research. Examine your research carefully and be as critical as possible, noting all the things you missed, messed up on, or even performed very well in.
You conclusion should discuss:
Strengths and Weaknesses
Essentially, strengths and weaknesses are determined by the decisions you make and the variables within your control throughout the study. These factors have a direct impact on the study’s quality and the validity of its findings.
Make a note of everything you changed to the research to improve it and make it more robust. These are your advantages. Similarly, consider items under your control that accidentally revealed themselves as flaws or resulted in skewed findings because of your activities. These are your flaws.
In an ideal world, your strengths and weaknesses would have a link. To identify entwined strengths and weaknesses, determine which aspects of your study may have been impacted accidentally because of your control over anything.
Restrictions and Enhancements
Identify any external factors that contribute to the bias or skewed nature of your IA and select three significant elements from this list. These are your constraints, and for each constraint, you must provide a feasible modification or improvement that may be relevant in future study to mitigate its consequences.
You should detect constraints by distributing your IA’s coverage as evenly as feasible. This includes describing your sample strategy, the kind of individuals you recruited, the materials you utilized, and so on.
Scope
The simplest ways to approach this section is to divide it into two parts:
- A possible solution to an environmental problem
- Solution evaluation
By dividing this portion into these two sections, you guarantee that you meet all of the ESS IA requirements, as your points are directly related to these two items.
To begin, you must directly address the identified environmental concern in your study’s conclusion. This should be brief, no more than two sentences.
You should explicitly offer a solution that can be adopted in daily life, such as specific rules against deforestation or measures to increase access to resources. Your answer should clearly show what you’ve discovered in real life to highlight the study’s significance.
The solution section may be significantly longer. Here you state one of your solution’s strengths and one of its weaknesses.