IA What to write for Section A: Plan of the Investigation

[saerunanna]

Hey everyone!

Okay, so over summer we had to write our first IA that will be graded by the IB and honestly I'm freaking out!!

• What exactly am I supposed to write in Section A?
  
• How should I start it?
  

Thank you so much and good luck!!

[Emmi]

For section A you need three things mainly: the topic that you're investigation (which you can write as either a question or a statement), the scope of the investigation (what exactly you're covering), and the method of investigation (how you researched and came to the conclusion at the end of your IA).

Pretend I was doing my IA and the topic I chose was "To what extent did Hitler hate Jewish people?" (lol I know, just go with it). When writing Part A, you really don't want to go over 150 words because you want to save those precious words for your summary of evidence and analysis portions. So you've got to be concise, but be thorough.

You can start with a short one or two sentence introduction that introduces your topic, but only do that if it's relevant. When I actually did mine, I just started off by stating the question. I then stated the time period I was working with for the scope. Then, I described how I researched my topic and how I used them all to come to my interpretation of the events. Lastly, I stated the two sources that I would be evaluating in Part C.

So back to my fake IA topic. Using that topic as well as the things you should include, your Part A should look a little something like this:

This investigation will attempt to answer the question: "To what extent did Hitler hate Jewish people?" The scope of this question is limited to the years 1925-1939 prior to the outbreak of World War II and only examines Hitler and the Nazis' actions. To answer this question, primary documents, such as Hitler's own memoirs and official Nazi documents, will be compared with later historians' opinions. Differing interpretations will be analyzed, such as X and Y, and a conclusion will be drawn from the evidence presented. Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf and Emy Glau-ski's Why Hitler is an Awful Person But Not As Awful As Stalin are two of the principle sources and will be evaluated for origin, purpose, value, and limitation.

You obviously don't have to follow this model, but this was how I formatted and wrote my Part A for my IA.

Good luck