Internal Assessment

Choosing a research question

For Students:

Perhaps the hardest part of the biology IA is choosing an appropriate research question. The temptation is high to simply google "best biology IA titles" or use AI to generate ideas for you. While this could be helpful, it also runs the risk of creating generic and uninteresting topics. The key to doing well in the IA is to be interested and involved in the process right from the beginning.

The best way to start on the IA journey is to think about what interests YOU!

Consider writing a list of broad topics that you enjoy. 

Pick one from your list and try and think of a more specific area within that topic.

For example, I am interested in human physiology as a broad topic. I narrow this down to nervous transmission, as I find this very interesting.

Now you should think of an intervention that may affect nervous transmission.

For example, does body weight affect nervous transmission?

I now have my research question.

The next step is to be very clear about the variables involved in creating an experiment to answer this question.

Independent variable - The thing that you will change. 

In this example it would be body weight

Dependent variable - The thing that you will measure. 

Perhaps this could be measured by reaction time

Controlled variables - The things that you will keep the same. 

This is incredibly important. You should think about all the things that could affect reaction time and keep these the same (if at all possible).

This obviously now needs a lot of work to flesh out the detail, but it is a good starting point.

IA proposal template

To structure your thoughts on your experimental design. Useful to share ideas between class and teacher.

Internal assessment template

To help structure the writing of the internal assessment.

IA marking rubric

IB Science experimentation guidelines