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March 29, 2024, 05:28:47 am

Author Topic: Extended Investigation - a promotion and guide (not sponsored, I promise)  (Read 12628 times)  Share 

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dedformed

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Hello beans,

I just finished Year 11 and have ample time to waste so why not be a little productive and write a little guide for EI! When I started this year, I had barely any resources or posts to look up to outside my teachers (who were awesome support anyway!) There's another guide but it's not been completed, so I thought maybe I could add my two cents. So here goes something:

author's note
ALSO WHAT this turned out to be almost 4000 words. I wanted to write a quick 10 minute read but it turned out to be three hours of writing so it's going to have a lot of typos which I might fix along the way.

What is Extended Investigation?

Hmm, I hear you say, I’ve never heard of EI before…

Of course you haven’t lol there’s a cohort of 250 doing it in the whole state. It’s a small subject and most people I talk to are surprised when I tell them what it is and what it entails.

Basically, Extended Investigation is a ¾ VCE subject (doesn’t have Unit 1 or 2) where you undertake any research project of your liking (well unless it gets rejected by VCAA, but that basically never happens unless you’re committing some serious ethical blunder) and write a 4000 word report about it. You also get to talk about it for a whole twenty minutes in front of two assessors to whom you introduce yourself as a number.

The whole idea of the course is to build on critical thinking skills and mould your academic language.

Is it even possible to do it?

There’s two major reasons that hinder people from EI.
“A 4000 word report?!” is the most common reaction to EI when I tell people I’m doing it.

But hey, it’s a whole year of work. Most people I know have so many words we chuck them all into tables (tables are not included in the word count, lol). At the start of the year I was a bit anxious about writing a full 4000 words but before submitting in September, I was worrying about how to cut down my 8000ish words to the limit (which they modified to 3500 this year, thanks VCAA how helpful).

When you research something for so long you have a lot to say. For instance, a lot of people doing science topics had to write massive literature reviews explaining the context of their research, quote various scientists when justifying their method and adding context to other points they made in their discussion. My work was so long I chucked my entire method section into a table.

So yeah, 4000 word report is the least of your concerns.
The second one is: how do you motivate yourself?

This one can be really hard. I think a lot of people in my class were still writing their report two hours before it was due. Some people didn’t even finish.

The most important aspect is to manage time and work on it consistently. Which is hard, I admit.

But people who didn’t finish were also the ones with the most complicated topics. If you’re doing some rocket science (literally) but you’re actually an art person that only picked that topic to sound fancy, you’re going to struggle to care. If you pick something you really like (and I’m sure there’s plenty of things out there, someone at my school did one about how memes influence zoomer humour, surely you could do anything!)

Pick a topic you like, and you’ll find yourself procrastinating by doing EI. That’s how I managed my deadlines.



Scaling?
EI scales by about 2 points most years if you’re in the mid thirties to mid forties range. However, you must note that there’s like 300 kids on average doing EI every year and only 9% get over 40, so there’s only a handful of high scorers. If you’re wondering, no, as of November 2020 I don’t know my score yet, but let me tell you it’s a massive mystery number. If you’re reading this after December 30, 2020, you could explore my journal to see if I ever posted my score or not. Like I could get a 50 but I could also get a 30, I never know.

But isn’t that a bad thing?

Kind of, yes. One of the downsides of EI is that it’s not a “safe” high scoring subject. There’s so many people doing so many things – it’s so hard to grade a humanities report against a science one, so you can’t know what your assessors are going to think.

The point of EI is to build that resume and some uni habits early on so you get a flex in uni.

Why should you do it anyway?

Okay so why would you spend so long meticulously researching a topic and writing so much about it you could talk about it to strangers for a whole twenty minutes? Especially when you think about the scoring, it seems a bit risky, right?

That’s true, but I don’t think this is a subject you do for the scores. I know that’s a tough thing to tell a VCE student but if it’s in your bottom twos I don’t think thirties or forties make that much of a difference. The amount of insight that comes from this subject is insane.

Like actually.

Have you ever been part of a huge waiting line outside a toilet cubicle? Imagine this: you’re standing, bored and restless, waiting for someone to succour you from the boredom and distract you from the gravity pulling at your intestine contents. A figure pops into view. They say, “have you ever wondered the maximal velocity a child could hit on a slide before getting hurt?”(citation: someone from my class)

And for the first time in your life, you ask yourself that question.

The ten minutes pass by smoothly and you have just made a charming friend.

Now imagine you could be that charming friend.

So that’s reason #1 It’s a massive flex.

Also, imagine scenario 1 again, this time you’re the person explaining the antibacterial properties of a specific flower you found in your backyard. And somehow, the person you just relieved from boredom works for Harvard.

They ask you how you know all that, and you say you’ve written a 4000 word report about it.

20 minutes later, you get a text, “Harvard wants to know your location”.

So there’s point #2: it’s a massive resume builder. It shows how meticulous, hardworking and organised you are. It shows you’re passionate, curious and smart. It speaks nerd.

If you’ve done 3 3/4s in Year 11 you probably have to take up a seventh subject for VCE in year 12. Or maybe you haven’t done any ½ subjects in Year 10 and are looking to do a ¾ in Year 11. I think EI is the ideal boi in this situation. This is because not only is it flexible (like you work at your own pace and work on it in the holis), you’re also finished with your report early September. The Oral Presentation Examinations are held in the first two weeks of October, but hey, after a whole year of constantly working on things, you won’t need too much time to write a script. In fact I didn’t even memorise my ‘speech’ (which was honestly half improvised). I just organised myself with dot points about each slide and went with my thoughts.

My point #3 is that you can find a lot of time to focus on other things while still producing compelling outcomes for EI.


Assessment?

U3: School SACs
Mine were:
1. Submit question along with 800 word justification of why your topic is goooood.
2. Submit a literature review and a proposed method.
3. Do an oral presentation of everything you’ve prepped so far and proposed method.

I worked on my method from April to June, but most people finished later in July (or even August). I did a survey and the whole process of designing it, publishing it and sharing it, then analysing the results (most time consuming part) was still less time consuming than some classmates who did experiments and had to order in equipment/ bacteria/ etc to establish their setup.

In a normal year you’d have a Critical Thinking Exam during Term 2 but this year we did it in October due to coronavirus. See U4 for more details on this.

U 4: All external assessments
-   Submission of report (during September-ish): this is the baby you’ve been labouring for nine months. Your brain child. It’s got everything about your report, from start to finish,
-   Oral Presentation (usually second week of October): 10 minute presentation of your work and 10 minutes of QnA from the assessors. Externally assessed at this dodgy hotel in Nunawading.
-   CTT: The Critical Thinking Test is a one hour exam. It’s the only VCAA computer based exam. You sit it on your own laptop, lol. It’s basically ten questions that ask you to analyse a few arguments and write your own strong ones about them or against them. It’s just constructing arguments so if you’ve done debating it’s like being third speaker and either summarising a case or rebutting.
-   GAT: The GAT happened during U4 this year so I’m putting it in this section. This may have a strong influence on EI scores since they’re so diversely graded. So maybe keep an eye on the writing tasks and your overall performance anyway (you should be doing that anyway).

Okay so you bought my pitch and are wanted to do EI. What next?

Does your school offer it? Great! Talk to your careers counsellor and the logistics of doing it.

Does your school not offer it? You could do VSV. Since most of the subject is self paced anyway I don’t think doing it online makes a difference, as long as you have access to a lab/ library, subject to your topic’s needs.


Choosing a topic

Congrats! You’re doing EI. Now what?

It’s December holidays.

Read some stuff you’re interested about. This could be a science magazine, a political newspaper, anything. Ask questions. Some things that I shortlisted as my questions were:

How would the government of Victoria respond to a local epidemic (interview – HAHAHAHAHAHAH this would’ve been hilarious because I picked this before the pandemic happened lol)

How does handwriting affect credibility of text?

How do different pen holding positions affect handwriting? (for some reason I was really interested in pens)

How will social media affect isolation levels in future senior citizens (I actually did this topic for my first SAC and would have pursued it had I not found my own topic).

My topic was about this condition called aphantasia, characterised by the absence of visual imagery in people. Like these people see no images in their brain when they think, can you imagine (haha, I totally don’t overuse that joke). I looked at whether this condition impacted students’ learning preferences.

It started with a meme. This thing on Instagram during mid April, when I was worried I would fail my literature review SAC because the senior citizen topic wasn’t unravelling properly enough. It was this flood of posts asking you to imagine an apple (maybe you guys saw it too?) and how not everyone imagined things the same.

Instantly I thought about: does this condition affect people in the classroom? Is that why we have visual learners and auditory learners? Is that why my friend can draw literally anything from her “mind’s eye”, yet I cant?

And that became my topic.

My point is: explore everything you’re interested in and actually ask questions. Write down your shower thoughts. I’ve gotten into this habit and the amount of questions I have now is so weird.
Like are people with low visual imagery at less risk of schizophrenia? (you can try researching that if you want but I doubt there’s enough literature for it).

Refining your question

Make sure your question is specific and feasible for someone with your resources and expertise. Avoid assumptions. Generally they'll send your questions for VCAA to approve and it's unlikely they'll reject your question unless it's seriously ethically messed up (eg you cant work with vertebrates or have a question discussing intellect linking to race or something idk)

Maintaining the research journal


So for EI you’ll be asked to maintain a research journal to authenticate your work. Make sure  you use this wisely and don’t make a fake one the night before it’s due.

I literally had the same journal the whole year (with various copies, of course). The end product was 150 pages of flex worthy material, containing various quotes, slides, diagrams, some draft sections of my final report.

Having it all in one organised place is a very effective way to navigate through your process and it’s also a big motivation boost to see the burgeoning (yes I wanted to use this word) word count because it shows you your hard work is coming together. In saying that, be careful not to dump everything without context. I used headings in google docs and had a table of contents page for everything. I broke entries down by area of study, then date and a 3 or four word title for context. This helped me find stuff down the track when I wanted to quote someone or something for my final report.

How I laid out my research was

(website)
(citation, usually from Google Scholar)
(a few words for context)
(big chunks of quotes with highlighted parts)
(some notes)

I also commented on places to add to the notes.

Where to find literature

I was lucky enough to have my school provide access to JSTOR and many other academic resources, but if you can’t manage to get hold of those you can always go to trusty Google Scholar. Usually you can directly access the pdf of things from the search engine.

Another trusty friend was State Library Victoria. If you haven’t already got an account, excuse me, please do! It’s the most useful hub of resources I’ve found and it’s free! I’ve been using it since Year 9. When I was in Year 9 I had a research task on WW1 soldiers that lived in my area and I found my allocated soldier’s personal letters to his sister (later published by her) in the state library’s archives. Saved me grace and butt.

The research process

It might seem daunting to learn truckloads about something that you’ve just been introduced to, but once you read that first article, you’ll have your ball rolling.

Usually once you start reading one paper, there’s many others cited in there that you can go through for further reference. Good papers often cite rebutting arguments for their case too, so you should be able to find a range of literature on starting your very first paper.

As soon as you feel like you have enough knowledge to build some writing, get started. Scribe your claims, make sure you have at least two articles backing up any statement you make. VCAA is quite explicit about students saying there’s absolutely no research about something. The internet is a dumpsite. Surely in a small niche, there’s something! Use Boolean operators, “and”, “not”, “or” etc. These are handy. Use recent articles. You can do this through Google Scholar on the side of the page and filter any articles older than 10 years. You want to look organised.

Know that your first draft will look nothing like your final report, so don’t worry if it’s too clunky at this stage. Just keep writing until you think you’ve covered enough for the SAC. Make sure you stick to the rubric, word for word. You can refine it in the later stages.

Also, it’s normal to be over the wordcount by a lot. Usually you can condense the information by looking at the rubric and asking yourself: is this important? If not, chuck it into your research journal.

DO NOT DELETE ANY WORK. READ THAT AGAIN. Keep everything until you finish your oral presentation. Put every extra bit of info onto the journal. Learn to hoard, but be an organised hoarder.

Method

Given the versatility of this subject, it’s hard for me to suggest a specific method but here’s some general advice:

Anything you do should be justified using expert opinion. The point of the subject is critical thinking, and you can demonstrate that by showing how your research would fit into the bigger picture of things. Make sure you cite why you’re using 7mLs of HCl and why your survey is 10 questions long. Make sure you mention the importance of your inclusion and exclusion criteria in your literature review.

Also, don’t be a me and plan ahead. How are you going to analyse your results? How are you going to present them? This will help you determine how to categorise your data when collecting it. If I’d thought about my analysis during method prep, I would’ve struggled less with the statistical analyses in my work. I didn’t set the right framework for my discussion and had to do a lot of work post-results to format the data.


Results and Discussion

Results in?

Assumptions out.

Break down your data into themes/ categories and be organised with how you present the data. Take inspiration from authors in your field and from teachers. Your results will be a base for your discussion and the better you set your shafts, the stronger your building will stand.

For your discussion, a key word is SYNTHESISE. Make sure you draw on information from your literature review and compare your results to your hypothesis and to other researcher’s predictions.

Make sure you include a section about mistakes, but don’t call it that. Call it “future research implications” and discuss how your data could be improved or other variables that may controlled to allow for more accurate data.

NEVER use the word “mistake” itself. Make sure you mention things in a positive light only. But make sure you do discuss all the extraneous variables that affected the validity of your work. Make sure you refer to bias or other relevant terms researchers use to critique their work. Take inspiration from authors in your field.

Conclusion
Just briefly refer to your hypothesis and answer your question with blanket ideas.

IT’S OKAY NOT TO HAVE A DEFINITE OR POSITIVE CLAIM ABOUT YOUR HYPOTHESIS. Lack of data is still data. Don’t be ashamed to add “but further evidence can be used to confirm this”. Almost everyone’s answer was “definitely maybe”.

Be proud of your overall work.

First draft of final Report

Okay so now you know where you’re heading. Put on your helmet.

For the final report, make sure you’ve got a template handy. An example is:

Title
Aim
Significance
Literature review
Method and Justification
Hypothesis
Results
Discussion
Conclusion

Of course it’s very flexible – some people had none of that, say, if you’re doing a case study there’s going to be a completely different structure. The point is to create a template before you start writing your report.

Once you get into the actual report, you’ll notice you’ve got bits and pieces of everything, but not completed. Having a template breaks your work into sections. This can be useful when looking at the smaller picture before you review your first draft and allow you to evaluate how well the report flows.

For now, don’t worry about word count, but add that to your bucket list of things to stress about.


Finished with the first draft? You sure about that?

Congrats! You’ve done so much! Nominate yourself for a nobel prize. Sleep in a few days.

And stay away from your report.

Once you finish your first draft, it’s going to look too perfect to you. Like a parent who loves their child regardless of their flaws, your instinct is going to want you to protect that brain baby and you’re probably exhausted of the writing process, because it took me two eight hour sittings to finish that (some people worked an hour everyday, I just had two massive productive spikes).

Instead of writing, take a break. Read more in your field and build on your knowledge, but don’t add anything. Watch Youtube videos about your work. Watch talks. You’re a micro expert, own it.

Come back to it after a week, but make sure you’ve been productive that week by updating your knowledge reservoirs.

Now, reread it in sections. You’ll realise how naïve you were to think it was the final product.

Fix it.

Second draft time

Okay so now your report looks even more shiny and glamorous than before. What to do now?

You’re going to get a lot of people telling you to send your report to every sentient being you’ve interacted with.

DO NOT DO THAT. EVER. Save your friends the struggle.

Send it to ONE person. Get feedback, and improve by your discretion.

Why?

Because if you get too much feedback at once you’ll be too overwhelmed and end up deleting all the comments one by one. Get feedback, fix. Email to another person, but keep your EI teacher in loop. If you send everyone your second draft they’re all gonna get bored if you send it to them again.


Word Count.

Okay so now you can worry about the beautiful word count. Here’s some ways to reduce it, but DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING just add it to your journal in case you want it back.

The word count does not include the whole report; things like citations, tables, figure labels don’t count, so make sure you familiarise yourself with that stuff on the VCAA Extended Investigation page.

 Read the research question you came up with and see which parts of your research don’t directly answer your question or fit with the rubric.

Check for redundant phrases “it is crucial to say” can be replaced by “importantly”, “very big impact” can be “strong impact”. Fix your adjectives and you’ll be surprised to see how much your word count disappears.

Ensure that you break down your work by theme rather than by author. A lot of authors echo the same ideas so it’s better to synthesise citations rather than quote everyone separately. Don’t repeat things, it’s just annoying to read the same thing over and over in different words.

And soon, you’ll notice that you’ve hit that submit button and you’ve crossed the major obstacle in your course.

Critical Thinking Test

VCAA’s website and handbook has a lot of information about this. Do the practice exams and you’ll be fine.

Here's my other post about CTT.

Oral Presentation

I’m not going to go too much into depth for the first ten minutes because a) this turned out longer than expected and I’ve been writing for over three hours, b) the word count is more than that of my “official” EI report itself and c) you will be a  better judge of how to present your research. Just avoid rambling about things the rubric doesn’t mention and don’t have too much text on your slides, if you use them.

For the questions section, make sure you’ve got a good hold of all the contemporary research in your field. Talk to everyone about your work. Make sure your dog can spell the major researchers’ names. Make sure your parrot sings about cat liver disease. Make sure you dream about it. Immerse yourself in potential questions about your work.

The assessors are nice. They ask questions to increase your grade and address areas you haven’t explored enough, not to intimidate you. They’re usually friendly and try to make you comfortable.

And before you know it, you’ll be smiling at the massive accomplishments you’ve made by completing EI.

Some other tips




 
« Last Edit: November 25, 2020, 07:37:46 pm by dedformed »
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Bri MT

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Re: Extended Investigation - a promotion and guide (not sponsored, I promise)
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2020, 07:31:09 pm »
+2
Hello,

Wow this is huge :D

Also I don't see any images in my mind & it is something I bring up occasionally when talking about study strategy (there are some people who can memorise a mindmap and see it in their mind on exam day. Wild)

This guide/promo seems incredibly useful so I've stickied it


Thank you for writing this!