IA Advice & Ideas

Hi everyone,

Just wondering if there any bits of advice about doing IA's that you guys have and if you have any ideas for possible topics to do my IA's on.

My subjects are HL English (already did my IOP), Business, Geography (fieldwork?), SL Environmental Systems and Societies, Spanish and Math Studies.

Thanks so much.

Reply 1

Jordyn02

My advice would be to find something that you're at least vaguely interested in for your IA's. I really enjoyed my Maths Studies IA as I did it on the colour distribution in Smarties! But I hated my English as I didn't like any of the books or the topic I chose, it made the entire thing drag and stressed me out. I guess another bit of advice would be start it early, I know this is pretty standard advice but it really does help! Also get someone (like a friend or a family member) to check over your final draft for silly grammar/ spelling mistakes.
I hope this helped a little.
Jordyn.
Hl- Spanish B, Chemistry, Biology
Sl- English A Lit, Maths Studies, Psychology

Reply 2

Yrk

Are you doing two IAs for English - one for SL and one for HL?
I can't really remember exactly what I did for my IAs because it was about three years ago and I deleted my files to make room for all my uni work on my laptop.
My advice would be to read the markscheme for IAs, ask your teacher and they should be able to show you. It will give you a good idea of what you need to do to get a good grade. For my English IA I did a comparison of two of the set texts along a common theme. I think my question was something along the lines of 'How has language been used in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and in The Outsider by Albert Camus to covey the theme of imprisonment.' It wasn't exactly that but basically the gist. My HL English IA was on Woman At Point Zero and I believe it talked about the theme of money in the book.

For my Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS) IA on zonation, the idea being that vegetation grows in 'zones' so you could for example see different vegetation growing at different distances from the sea on a rock cliff or on the beach. You need to make sure for the ESS IA that you do a good introduction and show that you're familiar with the terms and concepts that you're talking about. The success of the experiment is not as important as being able to discuss the results and limitations. As long as you discuss any mistakes you made and show that you made a reasonable attempt to avoid mistakes in the experiment you should be ok for that. Again, ask your teacher to show you a mark scheme so you know what key points you need to aim for.

For geography I did an experiment while I was on residential about biodiversity in a river with a treated sewage outlet. The hypothesis original hypothesis was that biodiversity would be greatest furthest away from the treated sewage outlet. We picked five points along the river to take samples including catching fauna from the river and taking several tests for water quality (can't remember what they were sorry). I believe what we found was that some species thrived at the outlet because there were greater numbers of some nutrients present in the treated water as opposed to the water. Again, like the ESS IA you need to make sure you introduce the concepts well and give the experiment some context. Make sure you provide any necessary diagrams or maps that are relevant to the experiment. Again, discussion and evaluation are more important than the results themselves.

Likelihood is that with both the geography and ESS IAs you will need to run some statistical tests on the data, they shouldn't be too difficult but think carefully about which tests will be most useful for interpreting your data or proving correlation.

For Maths studies you will definitely need to know how to carry out statistical tests, and you will need to show each on e at least once in long hand to show that you can do it without a calculator programme or excel (provided it's possible to do so). You won't need to show all workings once you've shown you can do a test once by longhand as it takes up way too much space and time. I did a statistical project for Maths studies on whether GDP of a country affects performance in the olympics. I looked at both the total number of gold medals won from a random sample (you will need to pick and then explain your sampling technique -I used a function on the calculator to randomise for me) of countries over set number of years (sorry I can't remember how many years of data I used) and compared it to the GDP over the same period. I then discussed the results before testing a second hypothesis that the total number of medals won would be higher for countries with a higher GDP. Again, make sure you discuss and evaluate properly. The maths IA is likely to be the longest one of all of them because of the number of stats tests you will need to do and the number of graphs you need to include. A statistical project is probably the easiest kind to do, but I think you can choose something else if you don't like stats.

Biggest advice is definitely to ask to see the markschemes for each subject IA and try to satisfy the critera for the top grade. Hope this helps and good luck! :smile:

Reply 3

NimbusClouds

Omgosh thank you so much for your advice! Markschemes are a pretty good idea to look into- so thank you!!

Reply 4

NimbusClouds

Jordyn thank you for your reply! Having someone proof read my work is probably a good idea (knowing my spelling) and I suppose it would help if I actually enjoy what I'm investigating for my IA. :tongue: