Leaving Cert geography

thelad95

Could someone clear up a couple of things regarding the geography field study?
The teacher who is helping me with it is absolutely awful. She has no clue what she's doing. Basically what I want to know is the following:

Are you allowed to give more than 4 aims/hypotheses? Our teacher wants us to give at least 6?
In the Gathering section, the marking scheme states you have to give 9 SRP's on two 'methods'. What exactly is a method? We are writing in 'tasks' instead.

It is really annoying as I need an A in this subject.

Advice from anyone would be appreciated (especially mods).

T0001

Gathering: 1.Observations 2.Apparatus and their use in your field study

The project must not exceed 1000 words. We have 4 aims and are still over. 6 seems over the top.

maedhbh_mac

You should have one hypothesis (i.e. 'geomorphic processes of erosion shaped the v-valley at xyz co-ordinates') and then up to 4 aims - be aware that in the chief examiner's report 2012 for geography (available at examinations.ie) candidates were criticised because they "did not refer to the specific landform and instead presented a generic set of aims which could have applied to any number of geographical investigations". Your aims should be very specific to your project and can refer to the tasks you're going to do i.e. 'I wanted to develop my practical geographical investigation skills by measuring stream velocity'.

With regards the tasks, again, the chief examiner's report is a good resource, saying that "This section requires candidates to report on the two tasks/methods used to gather the information for the geographical investigation. As outlined in Circular S85/09 “A
method of gathering may be a single activity, such as, for example, measuring. A method of gathering may also be a task. A task is a group of relevant linked activities. For example, in a land use survey, a task could involve a number of the following activities – sketching, counting, measuring, colour coding etc. Any number of these, or similar activities, could be combined to form one gathering task.” Candidates were awarded high marks when they clearly identified the two tasks/methods which linked to the aims of the geographical investigation and when they elaborated in detail on how these tasks/methods were executed. There was insufficient elaboration by some candidates on the explicit details of the gathering of information while there was an overemphasis on why activities were undertaken by other candidates. Some candidates presented very detailed accounts on why the geographical investigation was undertaken which had no relevance to this section of the report."

So the individual things you did should be grouped as tasks, as you can only have two tasks. Usually this means formatting it so that the activities (I'm presuming this is what you mean by methods) can be grouped together under an overall heading i.e. task 1 might be 'to measure the erosive effectiveness of the river' and you'd include velocity, cross-section of the river and bedrock analysis and task 2 might be 'to prove that the valley at xyz co-ordinates is a v-valley', in which you'd include the profile of the valley and the profile of the river.

The geography project can be stressful - you should definitely have a read through the chief examiner's report because it's a great resource. Hopefully this will help any questions you might have or feel free to PM if you need any other advice.