SL Examiners report 2024

As ever it is important to point out that we do not represent the IB and that all IB teachers should be finding and reading the examiners reports on 'MYIB' for themselves. As teachers ourselves we are keen to read the reports and look for pointers and things to watch out for going forward. So that is all this is, a summary that is tuned in to some key pointers to focus on for the future. Any associated advice is mostly reflected int eh big expanse that is the  Internal Assessment Center - For students For now, this is just about Internal Assessment and it will be updated in the future to cover the external assessment section too.

Internal Assessment

I do think I make incremental improvements to the way I manage IAs with my students and I have really enjoyed the challenge of diversifying the work and opening my mind to different possibilities. The report points out that  most of the explorations were stats based and then modelling with some goodness of fit tests to look for normal distributions and, in fairness, I think this summarises most of my students work! I guess it is inevitable that we will drift in to patterns and I still think that the stats and modelling do offer really excellent opportunities for students to see maths describing the world around them!

Watch out for formulaic work! - I have seen this as a moderator and I totally understand why it happens and I can still see students having meaningful experiences within the structure of a template offered by a teacher, but it is important to be clear that the task as it is written is clearly looking for much more individualised work. This is time consuming for teachers and I am managing this more and more by spreading out the task over a longer period of time. This is particularly true in the beginning where the time from initial ideas through information collection/generation to planning is ong giving me lots of time in between stages to keep a breast of what students are doing and steer them carefully in to productive directions. This way when a block of lesson time is given to working on IAs then I am happy that students can be working productively. I know this is not always possible but wanted to offer a solution.

Beware the epic ramble - experienced teachers will know about this! Some students have an amazing capacity to write and write and write and repeat and repeat etc and this is definitely to be avoided. I actually try really hard to get everyone in this 12-20 page limit. I can see there will always be justifiable exceptions but think that since they have stated it clearly it is a good target to try and keep to. Concise is a key word in the marking criteria and I suspect that we are all persuaded that shorter and clearer is often better.

The marking criteria

Please check the detailed explanation and elaboration on the marking criteria we offer here.

Good headings - this is something I have struggled to ake progress with and I had a rant with my class about this on Friday! headings should be largely individual and related to the project and not generic. The report refers to a heading like 'methodology' and I have also fairly regularly seen headings like 'my processes' and 'reflection' so I appreciate this mention in the examiners report. I always push the use of a document headings structure. See advice about structure here.

Mathematical Communication - I am increasingly appreciative of this criterion, not as a mathematical pedant, but because actually using the right symbols, terms and descriptions really should be a symptom of their experiences in the classroom. At the same time I have to be wary not to beat myself up too much if it doesn't go well, but it should be really fixable and I do think there is an onus on us as teachers to point this out as much as possible in first draft feedback.

Personal engagement - I know from experience and time spent with teachers tht this criteria has always been harder to get our heads around than others. Here are some bullet points I thought of as I read the report

• Effort does not equal personal engagement
• Students working from templates like those mentioned above have little chance to show personal engagement
• Designing data collection tools and experiments and frameworks for explorations all have potential to show personal engagement but must come with good commentary that documents and justifies the choices they made
• Personal engagement is often a function of ownership, decisions and individuality in the exploration.

I also try hard to explain on my samples where I have or haven't seen this in justifying the scores.

Meaningful reflection is not as easy as it sounds - One thing that stood out for me as I read this report was the mention of suggestions that went way beyond the scope of what is possible by an SL IB student an this made me stop to think. I have always encouraged students to recognise the limitations of the work as a function of the scale that an SL IB student is capable of. I mean that I think students need to be aware that their work is understandable some way off anything that could be submitted as an academic research paper, but they can think about what might need to happen to bridge that gap. I would stand by this as a valuable reflection but I am prompted to think that actual reflections on realistic things the students could have done themselves do also have a lot of value and have made a mental note to encourage this.

I am also grateful to read that 'reflection should occur throughout' as this is part of advice I consistently give. As such a section called 'reflection' might not always be appropriate.

Mathematics

This is the bread and butter of course. You can't really do much of the above if you haven't done any good mathematics. the report is quite helpful I think in pointing out some dos and don't s  that help students to demonstrate that they understand what the mathematics is all about. I kow that this understanding is not always there but we can help by insisting on some key habits that students can remember. I thought I would try and make a list here....

• Relevance and purpose - students should always include some sentences that justify the relevance and purpose of the mathematics they are about to use. This relevance is not just mathematical relevance but also relevance to the stated aims of the exploration.
• Awareness of data types and the nature of data - easily overlooked, but really important in convincing a reader you know what is going on.
• Use the right words in the right place - don't confuse correlation with dependence
• Plot scatter diagrams before calculating PMCC - you only do it if can be justified
• Only use regression lines if you have a high enough value of PMCC
• Use the right terminology for hypothesis tests and state the significance level at the start
• Be aware of and state assumptions that are made  - notably when doing t-tests
• Watch out for expected frequencies less than 5 and if you use Yates, tell us why!
• Correlation does not imply causation!!!!!
• Justifying decisions on categorising

Summary

In summary here is a summary of key points offered...

• Achievable aims should be settled on and stated
• Make sure students are encouraged to consider a wide variety of topics
• We should be showing them through the syllabus what good presentation, communication and reflection looks like - this is going to be a real focus for me going forward
• Show students the criteria and examples of how it is applied
• There is then a reminder about our commitment to give them formal written feedback only once, without actually editing the document, to compliment discussions and oral feedback in the build up to that.
• Please annotate the samples! Also be explicit inn saying which bits of work you are referring to and explaining how it meets the criteria