How To Get 7 In Your ESS IA: Step-By-Step

The IA in ESS is considered by most students to be an assignment that can easily be done in a short amount of time. However, almost all students I've come across that actually completed it had major issues with understanding what exactly was required from them, finding out last minute their idea wasn't deemed fit for the subject or underestimating the role of your personal knowledge in being able to conduct the IA. Most humanities oriented students can't do experiments, and most science students can't do questionnaires. Keeping in mind that the IA is marked like you're conducting a experiment with a twist of humanities, you're bound to get confused as to how to approach your IA in the way the IB wants you to. 

In this step-by-step guide, I will be leading you through all the minimum requirements that will help you get a 7 in your ESS IA. This will guide you through the key elements of your IA, including the mandatory sections and examples of how you could split these sections up. While I did my IA on a questionnaire, the advice in this guide is geared toward those doing experiments as well.

I've also answered Frequently Asked Questions about the ESS IA. This post will be continually updated as long as I keep getting questions about it, so please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about it!

To keep track, there are 7 sections to your ESS IA, excluding your Title Page:

• Section 1: Introduction
• Section 2: Planning
• Section 3: Procedure
• Section 4: Data Collection & Processing
• Section 5: Analysis
• Section 6: Discussion & Evaluation
• Section 7: Application

Title Page:

There are a few essential things that need to be included in the title page of your IA. Below is a list of what should be included as well as an example, inspired by my own ESS IA.

• Header: Environmental Systems and Societies Internal Assessment
• Title of your IA (this should be only a few words long)
• Research Question
• Word count:
  It is maximally 2250 words and this excludes: titles for figures, titles for tables, references, bibliography, appendixes, any data inside a table
• Personal code

Section 1: Introduction

This section is used to introduce the environmental problem you are essentially addressing and question you're answering as a result. This should be split into 3 clear parts:

1. Introduce your Research Question (RQ)
   This question should be very specific to the study you're conducting. As the name states, it needs to be posed as a question that can be answered directly. Your RQ will shift and change throughout the process of you conducting and analysing your study. Make sure that all the references in your IA to your RQ are the exact same throughout the IA.
2. Discusses explicitly identified "environmental issue"
   You will be marked based on your connection of your study to an identified global/local issue and therefore this is a very important part of your introduction. You need to clearly identify 1 major issue you're claiming to address through doing this study. Try to look at the environmental issues you have seen on the news or, better yet, look at your own life and see if there are local changes to the environment that you could study. Try to back this part up with any relevant research that could highlight how important the issue is wherever possible!
3. Justify the region you chose to conduct it in
   While it's tempting, you can't just state that the region you did your study in was chosen because that's the only thing that was available to you. For most IB students, this is the case with any study they conduct. However, to get points you actually need to specifically talk about how important the issue you've chosen is in your specific region. You need to come up with any reason that isn't "it was the easiest area for me to study". Try to come up with different reasons that justify your choices that seem reasonable to any researcher reading your study.

Section 2: Planning

This section should provide a basic framework so that anyone that wants to repeat your study knows all of the materials used, the controls required, and the variables manipulated. You should lay down the elements listed below in a very basic manner so even a 10 year old could understand all the things they would need to do if they wanted to repeat the exact same steps you took.

You need to include:

• A table of experimental variables and how they were controlled.
  To save space and reduce your word count, these variables can be organised into a table like this:

"Named variable" refers to a specific variable needed in your study (ie. residential area of participants). "Controlling of variables" refers to what steps you took to make sure the named variable is indeed exactly what it is stated to be (ie. residents outside the city of London were excluded from the questionnaire). Therefore, your variable is now being controlled by you.

• The materials used in your study
  This includes anything from pens to your computer, your ruler to your calculator. Try to think of all the absolutely necessary materials you used at all points of your study and include this in the form of a dot point list, such as this:

• Your hypothesis
  This should include 1 sentence which states what you expect from the study. There should be 1-2 sentences backing up the reasoning behind hypothesising this. This can be done using prior research done in other parts of the world or with similar materials relevant to an experiment. 
• Ethical considerations
  Including ethical considerations in both a questionnaire or experimental study is important and counts for points. If you are conducting a study, making sure any humans/organisms involved in the study weren't harmed in any way in 3-5 sentences. In terms of a questionnaire, looking at the role of deception and the extent to which it was used in your study is essential to include. Take a look at this link, which notes the ethical considerations that IB Psych students need to consider in studies. You need to include these in the ethical considerations of your own study if it's a questionnaire.

Section 3: Procedure

What you discuss in this section largely depends on what type of IA you choose and indeed the large separation between experiments and questionnaires. You will have a completely different procedure for either choice. If you do an experiment, document the stages and materials used in your experiment in the same way you would in your science subjects. As there are no subjects that use questionnaires for their IAs, I will be documenting the parts you need to include if you want to do one for your IA.

If you're struggling to pick if you should do an experiment or questionnaire for your IA, I discussed the pros and cons of doing either in this post!

Based on my personal experience in doing a questionnaire, here are the major things you should include so you've covered all bases within your ESS IA:

Part 1: Talk briefly about the website you used to make the website (and, if possible, how)

Part 2: Creation of appropriate questions

First discuss what you're aiming to find out through your survey, and that one should aim to tailor all questions toward whatever RQ you've presented.

Create sections for your questionnaire. For each section, have clear aims within them to give you specific information. For example,  you can have 3 sections in your questionnaire, and the first section asks the participants opinions on Subject X, the second section asks academic questions about Subject X, and the third section asks the participants' family's opinions on Subject X.

Pretend you are giving a very straightforward guide to a researcher about how to make a near identical version of the IA you created. You would need to clarify the sections you included, briefly explain why you chose to include each question, and you would need to include at least 1 example of a certain type of question that can be asked.

Part 3: Covering how participants respond to your questions

You should include information as to how participants were able to respond to questions in your study. Each questionnaire is different and has different requirements to get the best possible data from them. This is what sometimes can make making the best response options difficult. Whatever you end up choosing, you need to include at least an explanation of what it is or a screenshot. 

Your responses can have fixed options, like the Likert Scale for opinions, a drop-down menu of different choices, etc. Your responses can also be open-ended, where participants can freely decide how little or much they wish to include in their response. 

You need to include at least 1 screenshot excerpt from survey itself so the person reading the IA can get a good feel of how this scale was seen in practice by participants.

Part 4: Include only if your questionnaire was translated

This section should be short (1-2 sentences), where you include:

• who translated your questionnaire
• why doing a translation is important in terms of getting responses

A translation of your questionnaire is essential if you live in an area or country where English is not the main language. When discussed in a section like this, even if the translated questionnaire was never used, you can get points for considering the region you're in and increasing the applicability of the study to people from different backgrounds.

Note: when discussing who translated your questionnaire, in the likely event it is someone close to you like an IB student if you yourself don't know the language, you should stress the fact the person translating is a native speaker rather than a fellow student. This should look like a justified action and not just a last minute quick translation by someone that may-or-may-not know the language!

Part 5: If there are certain calculations you did that are needed to be understood before going to the next section

This part can be completed after you've taken a good look at your raw data and what ways you could present it in your analysis. This is a particularly important part to include in this section if you present your data in terms of percentages for easier comprehension or if you're comparing average responses. You need to show the basic mathematical steps you took to present something in terms of percentage/mean.

Part 6: Justification of choices

This is a very important part of both a questionnaire and experimental IA. Justifications are a way to explain all your reasons for doing certain things. These include but are definitely not limited to:

• Why did you choose a certain response scale for your questionnaire? 
• Why did you choose a certain region for your responses to be in? 
• Why did you have a specific age group identified as necessary to partake in the questionnaire?

Try to come up with answers for questions that haven't even been raised yet by the teacher or your friends. This is a chance to cover all bases and make sure any holes in your study are seen as purposeful choices. You need to tread carefully and make sure this section is done properly, since this can set you up for either disaster (by looking like someone that doesn't really know what's wrong with their study and is overconfident) or can secure you good points (by looking like you know what you're doing and covering for any mistakes before they're even seen by the marker).

Section 4: Data Collection & Processing

This section is meant to only include your Raw Data, a relevant table which serves to give the reader a better understanding of what the numbers mean, and a few figures which visually show in an even easier way what the findings mean.

Part 1, Raw Data

Present your raw data as the very first table in this section. It is the table with all the very messy data that is difficult to comprehend on its own. This table can and probably will span over many pages, so don't be too concerned if your raw data is something over 3 pages!

Part 2, Processing Data

You can choose how to present this raw data in terms of other tables or figures. For experiments, ESS IAs generally keep to calculations/line graphs, whereas questionnaire IAs usually place more emphasis on presenting data in terms of pie charts/bar charts/tables. I've included an FAQ in this post about how you should decide what way to present your data.

In a questionnaire IA, you need to have figures for both:

• the raw data of responses from participants
• the demographics/essential information about the participants themselves. This includes anything about age or place of residence. These serve as incredibly valuable tools to discuss in Section 5: Analysis, where you can talk about how certain groups may have skewed results in a certain way and why.

Keep in mind Part 2 is the only opportunity you'll get to present your data to the marker, and you need to make it as clear as humanly possible what the trends are in the data. Even though they will, they shouldn't have to read your analysis to still understand the major findings in your data.

Section 5: Analysis

This section serves as one of the "main" parts of the IA, where you basically identify any clear findings from your study and briefly discuss the possible reasons behind these findings where relevant. This section is separated into 2 parts, where the first analyses what data was presented in the previous section and the second part is the actual conclusion that you reach directly from this analysis. Anything you state in the second part should be made very clear in part 1. You need to lead the marker through what things you should look at in your data to get to your conclusion.

Part One, Identifying Trends

Before writing this section in its entirety, first take a look at the data you've gathered and write a dot-point list of all the trends you can identify in your data.

Each paragraph should include:

• 1 major trend you identified
• the data that backs up the claim this trend exists (find as much data as possible to back up the trends and explicitly include them in your text)
• brief possible explanation for why this trend exists for the most important trends. Don't do this for all as you will be doing so mostly in the Conclusion and Section 6: Discussion & Evaluation

Find the most interesting possibly conflicting trends you've found in the responses that might back your hypothesis.

Part Two, Conclusion

If you have an experiment, this part is quite clearly cut out as your results are largely determined by if they are statistically significant or not. If you are doing a questionnaire, the line upon which you can safely assume your hypothesis has been proven is pretty vague.

To make this part slightly clearer to unpack, separate it into two. One paragraph should cover very clearly the most important trends directly answering your RQ. This paragraph should have a final sentence stating if this supports the hypothesis or not.

The second paragraph can provide more insight into the reasons behind why the hypothesis is accepted/rejected, and what this means in real life. This requires you applying your knowledge from the data into real life.

Section 6: Discussion & Evaluation

In this section, you need to whip out your critical thinking abilities and look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in your study. Take a good look at your study and criticise it as much as possible, looking at all the things you missed, screwed up on, or even did really well in :)

Part One: Strengths and Weaknesses

Understanding what exactly classifies as a strength or weakness is essential in this section, and what separates each from a limitation is equally as important. Essentially, strengths and weaknesses are mostly related to choices you made and things that were in your control when conducting the study. These directly affect the quality of the study and the validity of the results. 

Write a list of all the things you chose to change before the study to improve it and make the study more robust. These are your strengths. Similarly, look at things that were in your control that accidentally proved to be weaknesses or skewed results as a result of your actions. These are your weaknesses.

Ideally, your strengths and weaknesses should be intertwined. To find intertwined strengths & weaknesses, find what elements of your study may have inadvertently affected by you controlling something. For example, if you control the region participants must reside in to a very small region like your hometown, a strength rests in you getting a more accurate understanding of the environmental issue within that region. However, a weakness rests in being able to apply your findings into broader and different circumstances outside the area.

Part Two: Limitations and Improvements

Identify all the things that are out of your control that cause your IA to be biased/skewed, and pick 3 major items from this list. These are your limitations, and for each of these you must present a potential modification/improvement that can be implemented in future research that would curb the effects of this limitation.

You should identify limitations by covering different parts of your IA as equally as possible. This includes making reference to your sampling technique, what kind of participants you gathered, the materials you used, etc.

An example of how you could structure your limitations and improvements could be such that you have 1 sentence introducing briefly the limitation itself, 1 sentence detailing how this limitation could affect the study, and 1 sentence suggesting a relevant improvement to the limitation.

Section 7: Application

I was initially very confused about what this section was meant to include as most exemplar I read approached it very differently. However, one of the most straightforward ways you can do this section is by splitting it into 2 parts:

1. Potential solution to environmental issue
2. Evaluation of the solution

Splitting this section into these 2 parts ensures you hit the ESS IA criteria on the head, since your points are directly based on these 2 things.

Part 1: Potential solution to environmental issue

Remember the environmental issue you brought up all the way at the beginning of your IA in the introduction, where you were talking about why doing your study is important? Well, you need to directly address your identified environmental issue with the conclusion you got from your study. This should be small, around 2 sentences long.

You should clearly introduce a solution that can be implemented in everyday life, such as certain policies regarding deforestation or something to do with increasing access to materials. Your solution should clearly be able to introduce what you've found into real life to demonstrate how important your study has been. You need to keep your 1 solution to be as explicit, realistic, and short as possible.



Part 2: Evaluation of the solution.

This part can be slightly longer than Part 1, as you need to briefly analyse the solution. This requires mentioning 1 strength and 1 weakness of your solution. Try to think of what might happen if the solution is actually implemented:

• Are there certain things your solution might make worse? 
• Are there certain people that will be placed at a disadvantage if the solution is implemented?
• Will businesses and companies be affected positively/negatively by your solution?
• Does your solution truly address the issue, or only a very specific element within it?

Don't be afraid to unpack the potential pros and cons of solutions you've brainstormed, since it will show that you've critically thought about its realistic implementation. In other words, you will gain points if you come up with relevant flaws in your solution.

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That's it! You've gotten to the end of my guide on how to ace your ESS IA. While this shouldn't serve as the holy grail for your IA, this should give you a headstart into understanding what's needed from you to get good marks. If you have any questions or concerns, leave a comment below and I'll get back to you! Otherwise, subscribe or revisit this site for frequent posts about the IB assignments :)

Disclaimer: This article isn't written by an IB examiner or any professional, just a student who has gone through the IB and wants to help others get a good mark! To do so, I've looked at different resources that will help you if you are struggling to wrap your head around what exactly needs to be covered in the IA. It's not foolproof, but should be able to give you lots of guidance!