ESS IA General Feedback

Investigating the context (6 marks)

Research question must be phrased as a question and must reflect what you did in as much detail as
possible, include time frames and demographic details if appropriate. You must give Latin names of
plants/organisms investigated.

Environmental issue – your first words of your opening paragraph in your introduction should start off
with your environmental issue and if it is a local/national/global issue. e.g. Ocean acidification is a global
environmental issue. You should then explain why it is an issue. This is your IB SCIENCE SUBJECT you
must include science in this part! You then need to give case study example of this issue and you must
also include facts and data and should cite research that proves this is a local/national/issue.

You must only discuss one environmental issue.

Lastly in this section describe what you experiment is and how your research question links to the
environmental issue.

There are no requirements and therefore zero marks for personal engagement – if you have included
this delete it as waste of words.

Planning (6 marks)

This part tell the examiner how and most importantly why you devised your investigation the way you
have. You therefore need to explain and justify why you have done what you have done e.g. if you have
grown tomato plants why these plants and not something else? If you are using marble chips why have
you used these and if you crushed them why? if you asked year 12 students a questionnaire why this
age group. if you repeated the experiment 5 times why?

You must also explain your sampling strategy. If you sent a survey out then you need to say via what
platform and why that platform and not another means. If you asked 20 people, why 20 people and not
15 or 25?. If you went to 5 places in a forest why 5 and why those locations?

You then need to give a step by step set of instructions so that someone else could conduct your
experiment exactly as you have done it (Think, if you gave this section to a friend/parent would they
know exactly what to do and how to do it?) This means that if you have done a questionnaire you must
take a screen shot of the entire questionnaire and include this (otherwise someone else would not be
able to replicate your experiment)

Lastly in this section you need to include a risk assessment and think about ethical issues. Every project
will have these and so you cannot say it doesn’t. You can make it clear that you have considered RA by
saying that my experiment does not use harmful chemicals but as a precaution gloves were worn in case
substance caused irritation to the skin.

Results, analysis and conclusion (6 marks)

Firstly tabulate your raw data, ideally this should be on a single page of A4. If it cannot then you need to
make sure that you repeat table headings over subsequent pages. The raw data table should be able to
be read and understood on its own.

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Make sure units are included in the row header and not in individual data cells. You should round
numbers and max 2 decimal places. You must have the same number of significant figures for each data
point. (you cannot mix and match whole number and ones with decimals).

Your table should be set out so that each column is a variable with the first column as your independent
variable and subsequent columns as the dependent variable. You should make sub columns for the
repeats. You will have to play around with columns and rows and split them to make it work for your
data. You will probably need to use page breaks and make your data table a whole page and landscape.
Where possible columns and rows should be the same width. Your tables should look professional
otherwise you will lose marks on communication.

Independent Height of plant in cm Height of plant in cm

To aid reading of the data you should have a second data table which shows the processed data.

You should include the formula used and provide an example calculation for the first result, using the
equation function in Word.

Repeat 1+ Repeat 2+ Repeat 3+ Repeat 4

Independent variable Mean height of plant in Mean height of plant in

Your data table of your raw results should be first then you need to describe the actual results. Marks
will be awarded if you give qualitive descriptions and annotated photos e.g. on day 5 I could see the
leaves of plant X turning yellow whereas plant A was still green. Obviously, you can only do this for
experiments and fieldwork questions.

Photos on their own, with no labels pointing to specific things and described and/or explained will not
score any marks.

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Once you have described the data you need to analyse it. You need to have one graph of your results,
and it should show a correlation between your dependent and independent variable. In most cases this
will be a scatter graph.

You should not graph the raw data. if you have done a questionnaire you need to assign each response
a score so that you add up each response to give you a total score which you can assign to a category
e.g. score 0 - 14 = eco centric, 15 – 29 = anthropocentric, 30 + = technocentric. This will allow you then
to plot a graph of age against EVS. You now need to analyze the relationships (if any) that your results
generate.

Once you’ve analysed these results you can draw a conclusion to your experiment e.g. the more salty
the water the less the plant grew or younger people tend to be more ecocentric and older people more
anthropocentric. You must answer your research question. You must link your conclusion to your
results.

In this section you should not have discussed or mentioned your environmental issue.

Discussion and evaluation (6 marks)

You now need to relate your conclusion of your experiment to your environmental issue. This should be
straight forward if your RQ and EI are clearly related. If what you have done does not help you answer
the EI you can still get full marks for explaining this. However, you cannot score marks if you emit this
section e.g. I have found that tomato plants can tolerate a concentration of 1% salt but all died with 10%
or higher salt concentration. In hindsight this doesn’t really help me answer my EI as sea water has an
average salinity of 3% therefore using higher concentrations of salt does not replicate real life
conditions.

You also need to discuss the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of your method. These are three
separate (albeit related points) and you must address each. It should be a discussion e.g XX was a real
strength but was overshadowed by XX which had a massive impact on the validity of my results. You
need to decide overall how good your methods were. If you just posted a link to a survey on a social
media account and didn’t make sure you had the same number of people for each age group answering
the questions that this is clearly a huge flaw and almost completely invalidates your conclusion.
However, if you address this you can still get marks for it.

You then need to say what you would do differently in the future to make your method better. It does
need to be something different to what you already did. More repeats does not change the original
method.

Application (3 marks)

In this section you need to come up with one thing that will help the environmental issue based on your
findings of your experiment. E.g. if you have found that plants don’t do very well in salty soil than you
could suggest more money is spent on researching GM crops that are salt tolerant. This links to both the
EI of climate change causing sea water inundation on agricultural land and is also links to the experiment
of growing plants in different amounts of salinity. You must be as specific as you can be, raising
awareness is very vague. Ideally have a scientific solution.

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Once you have made your one suggestion, you now need to evaluate how good this suggestion will be
to solving the EI (strengths and weaknesses). You also need to explain how much this is actually going to
help to solve the EI. E.g. changing national school curriculum to make learning about causes of climate
change compulsory is only going to go so far if we do not invest in renewable energy.

Communication (3 marks)

 Your report must be within the word limit (2,250). Please note, IA’s that are much lower than
the allowed word count are clearly self-limiting and unlikely to score highly.
 You should have page numbers
 Should all be the same style font and same size.
 You should set your report out using the above categories.
 Proof read your work to make sure it makes sense and flows in a logical order.
 All graphs, photos, diagrams should have figure numbers they should start from Figure 1 and
then continue sequentially.
 You will loose marks if a screenshot of your questionnaire is not in the planning section
 Graphs must have title and axis labels and units
 Data tables should be formatted as described in methods
 You should be writing scientifically and using key ESS terminology.
 You should cite research and have a bibliography

Do not include an appendix as these are not read so waste of time!