Research

The importance of research skills

All Diploma students will be undertaking an extended essay so research skills should be covered thoroughly during their two year course. This may be by you, if you are supervising their extended essays in chemistry, or by other Diploma teachers or indeed by the school librarian. Even so, all your students will be doing their ten hour Individual Scientific Investigation in chemistry so you will need to ensure that they understand and can implement the skills required. The earlier you start this, particularly using examples of good practice yourself and giving them small projects to research either individually or in groups, the better.

The research process

The research process has been broken down by Marland[1] into nine separate stages:

It is worth sharing this flow chart with students to help them navigate their way through the process. There are several pages on this website detailing the specific skills needed for successful research in chemistry. They can be accessed through Extended Essays - Research. They give advice and provide examples. It seems unnecessary to go over them again here but they are obviously equally relevant and applicable to any type of research in chemistry.

The value of IB research

On a personal level many of my ex-students that I have spoken with say how the research training they received from the IB programme and the extended essay in particular gave them a head-start over non-IB students when it came to their university studies. This appears to be backed up by a recent report by Robin Julian which summarises the feedback from almost 400 IB Diploma graduates. Robin Julian is the IB curriculum manager for extended essays so is not completely impartial. ‘Almost 400’ IB graduates is also quite a small sample considering how many IB graduates there now are. What he found was that 72%  of the respondents (but how many of the ‘almost 400’ responded is not given) either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the extended essay was ‘an academically significant part’ of their DP experience. The article then goes on to quote selectively some of the benefits that the respondents commented on, such as “Transferability of skills” when it came to writing research papers at university and “The ability to formulate arguments in a coherent manner and to be disciplined in writing” in the workplace. If any teacher is doing a masters degree in education then there would appear to be quite fertile ground here to carry out a disciplined study looking at the possible benefits for all the areas of research that IB students are involved in (such as the Individual Scientific Investigation) as well as the extended essay.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Marland, M. (Ed.) (1981) Information Skills in the Secondary Curriculum. Schools Council Curriculum Bulletin No. 9. London: Methuen Educational. 
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