The first meeting

The student has determined an area of investigation in Chemistry and you have agreed to act as supervisor. The stage is set for the first meeting. In fact I would suggest dividing this meeting up into two. For the first part of the meeting I put all the students who have chosen to do their Extended Essay in Chemistry together (including those supervised by other Chemistry teachers). Then I meet separately with each of the students I am supervising.

General meeting

This is the meeting that covers all the general points (and saves you and your colleagues having to repeat yourselves). At this meeting I would:

• Welcome all the students, tell them they have made a wise choice and wish them success.
• Emphasise that success will come with hard work. Along the way there will be frustrations and disappointments but if they stick at it they will succeed.
• Tell that that I will discuss topics individually with them but for all of them only thing that is actually assessed is the final essay and they need to keep this in mind throughout.
• Tell them to keep a diary and record all the details about every resource they consult. The IB officially calls this the Researcher's reflection space. It could be a handwritten diary but it probably makes more sense for it to be in digital format, although if that is the case make sure they keep a regularly updated backup copy.
• Caution them against just using Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be quite a useful starting point but that is all. They should be basing their knowledge on sources that have been peer reviewed. These appear in journals and books. For each website they access or newspaper article they read tell them to try to locate the original source upon which it was based.
• Tell them how to plan their time so that they do not leave it all until the actual deadlines.
• Tell them about working in the laboratory – safety rules, risk assessments etc.
• Give them copies of the assessment criteria, the introductory part of the IB Extended Essay Guide and the subject specific Chemistry part of it.
• Remind them about Plagiarism and other forms of malpractice.
• Tell them where to find examples of excellent Extended Essays in Chemistry (in the library and on the school’s server).

Individual Meeting

The focus of this meeting is to get the student actually started on the research process in earnest. They have already agreed their general area of investigation. You need to discuss with them how they can refine this to an actual research topic . Extract from them what they already know about the area and then through discussion try to home in on a more focused component of the area that through experience you know could lead to a potentially good research question. For example, one common general area is ‘something to do with drugs’. By a process of elimination it should emerge that drugs like mild pain killers or antacids are going to be much more suitable to study in a school laboratory than others that may be illegal or too complex. Equally the testing of drugs on animals or humans is against ethical and Health and Safety guidelines etc. so this can lead to questions as what can be done in a laboratory. Obvious answers are techniques like separation of the pure drug from a mixture (e.g. steam distillation, chromatography), analysis by titration (redox or acid-base), preparation of a drug or analogues of it etc. Suggest to the student that what they should now do is read around the more focused area. You should probably direct them to some initial resources as well as Internet search engines and then tell them to try to find out what is known and what is not known. Tell them to continually ask themselves, ‘How does it all fit into my existing knowledge of Chemistry?’ and ‘How could I research this further?’  Arrange a time for the next meeting to discuss their findings.