IB DP History: The Historical Investigation (Internal Assessment) -- Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions – the IB holds copyright in its own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available through your school or the IB store.

Related: Historical Investigation study guide and revision notes.

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Section A

1. Name the four stages the historical investigation moves through. [4]

2. State the four things a strong source evaluation should establish about each source used. [4]

3. Does the investigation’s topic have to come from the class’s studied focused study, thematic study or regional study? [1]

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Section B

4. A student proposes the inquiry question: “What were the effects of industrialisation?”

(a) Explain why this question, as written, is likely to produce a weak investigation. [3] (b) Rewrite it as a genuinely focused inquiry question, and explain what makes your version an improvement. [4]

5. A student has gathered eight sources for their investigation, all newspaper articles from the same national newspaper, published within the same month, and all broadly supportive of the same interpretation of events.

(a) Identify the weakness in this source selection. [2] (b) Suggest two ways the student could improve their source selection. [3]

6. Explain why the same source can be described as highly valuable for one inquiry question and limited for a different inquiry question. [3]

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Section C

7. “A longer list of sources always produces a stronger historical investigation.” Evaluate this statement, and explain what the source-selection principle it gets wrong actually is. [6]

8. Explain how a student might use the four historical concepts (cause and consequence, continuity and change, perspectives, significance) to strengthen an investigation’s analysis, using one concept worked through in detail. [6]

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Worked answers

1. Formulating a focused inquiry question; identifying and selecting relevant, appropriately varied sources; analysing and evaluating those sources; and synthesizing evidence into a coherent, evidenced written response. [4]

2. Origin, purpose, value and limitation. [4]

3. No – the investigation may be on any historical topic the student can source and evaluate evidence for. [1]

4. (a) The question is too broad: “effects of industrialisation” could span an enormous range of economic, social and political outcomes across many countries and decades, inviting a general narrative summary rather than a focused, evidence-based argument that can be properly supported within the word limit. [3] (b) A reasonable improvement: “To what extent did industrialisation contribute to the growth of trade union membership in [a specific named country] between [two precise dates]?” This version works because it names a specific, narrow outcome (trade union membership growth) rather than “effects” generally, specifies a particular country and precise date range so the scope is manageable, and is framed as a “to what extent” question that invites genuine evaluation of competing evidence and factors rather than a purely descriptive answer. [4]

5. (a) All eight sources share the same origin (one newspaper), the same narrow time window, and the same broad perspective – this is a source list that lacks genuine variety in origin, type and perspective, which limits how much real evaluative comparison the investigation can do, since there is little disagreement or contrast between the sources to analyse. [2] (b) Any two reasonable suggestions, for example: including sources from a different type (an official government record, a personal account or diary, a source from a different country’s press) to introduce genuine variety of origin and perspective; deliberately seeking out at least one source that challenges or complicates the newspaper’s shared interpretation, to allow genuine evaluation of competing evidence; or including sources published at a different point in time (closer to or further from the event) to allow comparison of how interpretations may have shifted. [3]

6. A source’s value and limitation are not fixed properties of the source itself, but depend on what the investigation is trying to establish. A government minister’s diary, for example, might be highly valuable for a question about that minister’s personal motivations and decision-making, but far more limited for a question about how ordinary citizens experienced the same events, since the diary reflects one individual’s perspective and access to information rather than a representative account. The same source can therefore shift from highly valuable to significantly limited purely because the inquiry question being asked has changed. [3]

7. The statement is generally false: a smaller number of well-chosen, genuinely varied sources – differing in origin, type or perspective – that are evaluated in real depth typically scores more highly than a longer source list treated superficially. The principle the statement gets wrong is that source-based evaluation is a depth skill, not a coverage skill: the investigation’s marks reward how thoroughly and critically each source’s origin, purpose, value and limitation is analysed and connected to the argument, not how many sources are listed. A long list of sources evaluated only briefly or superficially, each getting a sentence or two of generic comment, typically scores lower than a shorter, carefully chosen selection where each source is genuinely interrogated and where at least one source deliberately challenges the emerging argument. [6]

8. Take significance as a worked example: rather than simply listing several factors that contributed to an outcome, a strong investigation using this concept explicitly weighs which factor mattered most, and why, using evidence from the evaluated sources to support that judgment – for instance, arguing that an economic factor was more significant than a political one in driving a specific outcome, because [a named source] shows the economic pressure predated and outlasted the political developments cited by [a different named source]. This is a stronger use of “significance” than simply describing multiple contributing factors without ranking or weighing them against each other, since the investigation’s analysis criterion specifically rewards an argument that reaches a substantiated judgment, not a balanced list of possible causes left unweighed. [6]

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief – History, first assessment 2028 – the same source cited by the study guide and revision notes. Verified 2026-09-06.