IA rough drafts
Having just completed the feedback on 25 IA rough drafts for the new curriculum, I thought I would share both my process and the common issues that I saw in student work. Overall, the marking process took me about the same amount of time as it did under the former curriculum. I used to give feedback by section, but in the new curriculum, I decided to have them submit the full report. Each report took me about 40 minutes to give feedback on. I definitely spent more than 10 minutes on every section of the old report. So, although doing it all at once was exhausting, it is not the big change that I feared.
My process
In place of giving feedback on every section, I did a lot of workshopping with my students in class. We started the process with a “project day” on April 29th, when I had three hours to work with my psychology students. You can see the details of what I did in this blog post.
I created a schedule to help them pace their work. The introduction was due on May 13th, the methodology on May 25th, data collection on June 8th, and the final draft on June 17th. On those dates, I went over the next component of the IA and met with each student to discuss their progress. For those who had not met the deadline, we made plans to ensure progress was made.
Between April 29th and June 17th, class time was given to work on the IA. The IB guide suggests spending 20 hours on the IA. Students had six 60-minute work periods during which I would meet with them to discuss their progress. They used this time to pilot their interviews and surveys and to clarify questions about the report.
Marking
To give feedback, I used the following form. A green check was awarded when the objective was met; a red check minus when it was attempted but needed improvement, and an X for when it was either mostly incorrect or missing. I then added comments for each criterion in the box below.
AI was a great help in marking. First, I will say that it made a lot of mistakes. AI is not a great way to give feedback on this assessment. There were several errors both in the reading of the IA and the interpretation of the rubric. However, the most helpful part was when it told me that the data collection tool did not align with the research question. As I always read the student work before checking the AI report, I was grateful to find out that I had missed it, sparing the student a potential loss of marks because I could not focus perfectly on 25 rough drafts!
Common problems
Overall, I felt that my students’ work showed a high level of engagement. And since I was checking in with them regularly, I feel that I have a good sense of their research process.
I noticed five consistent “issues” in the rough drafts.
Description of the studies: Many students wrote long, detailed descriptions of the procedures, rather than stating the aim and findings. This ate up a lot of their word count.
Discussion: Often students evaluated their study in the discussion, rather than discussing potential findings and implications.
Researcher bias: There were several that didn’t write about researcher bias, instead they wrote about how they were too young to be researchers and might not have the respect of the participants! Again, some just did a general evaluation of the study with no reference to researcher bias.
Putting information in the wrong section: Many students place items in different sections of the report. Several included their procedure in the data collection section, ethical considerations in the discussion, or evaluated researcher bias in the challenges to data collection section. In addition, in some cases, the aim in the Introduction did not match the aim in the Methodology.
Lack of directions for the data collection tool: Many students had only a list of questions, with no instructions for participants.