Clarification details
Updated December 2020. Minor revisions have been made to the sections ‘Preparing to carry out an inquiry’ and ‘Making annotations’.
Preparing to carry out an inquiry – Explanatory Note 4
Identification of a topic at this curriculum level should be more than a simple title such as ‘The Vietnam War’. A brief abstract which is a sentence or two in length is expected. The identification could, for example, explain the nature of the context and/or why it is worthy of study.
Carrying out preliminary reading should allow students to be specific when identifying intended possible sources. They should be able to identify specific book titles and authors or URLs, for example, and be able to state quite specifically what evidence appears to be useful in those sources. Preliminary reading should also help to ensure that the focussing questions students develop are feasible and avoid repetition of evidence.
Focussing questions should be discrete, open-ended, framed as questions, manageable, and lead to worthwhile research.
A plan could typically include consideration of when students will undertake different aspects of the inquiry process, and which specific sources they will use, (where they will try to locate them, how they intend to use a source) etc.
Making annotations – Explanatory Note 5
There is no expectation that every piece of evidence that is selected by a student will be annotated. Students can attain the higher grades by writing relatively brief annotations that are directly linked to specific, identified evidence and demonstrate their ability to think like an historian.
The last four bullet points help to identify evidence at Excellence, where ‘perceptive’ annotations are expected. For Excellence, students might be expected to use those sorts of annotations some of the time, but not all the time. Other types of annotation that are not listed in Explanatory Note (EN) 5 may also be acceptable.
Organising sources and evidence – Explanatory Note 6
The criterion for variety can be met by a variety of types of source (e.g. a library, the internet, an interview) and/or a variety of sources of the same type (e.g. several books or several internet sites). Source details that are to be recorded would be the same as those expected for Achievement Standard 91001 – see EN2 of that standard.
Evaluating the inquiry – Explanatory Note 7
Evaluations will typically include comment on several of the suggested topics, though there could be other topics as well. Evaluative comments are also likely to be found in annotations that a student has written, and they should be included in the evaluation judgement. The formal evaluation that is written needs to have detail, explanation, and examples to support generalisations made, especially for Merit and Excellence.