IB Diploma Programme History: Subject Overview

The IB Diploma Programme History course is a world history course, offered within the Individuals and Societies subject group, based on a comparative and multi-perspective approach to history. It involves the study of a variety of types of history – political, economic, social and cultural – and provides a balance of structure and flexibility.

What the course emphasizes

The course emphasizes encouraging students to think historically and develop historical skills, alongside gaining factual knowledge. It puts a premium on developing critical-thinking skills and on understanding multiple interpretations of history, making it a challenging and demanding critical exploration of the past. Teachers explicitly teach thinking and research skills such as comprehension, text analysis, transfer, and the use of primary sources.

Six key concepts have particular prominence throughout the course: change, continuity, causation, consequence, significance and perspectives. The IB’s current DP History specification (first examined 2028, see “How it’s assessed” below) consolidates these into four named concepts – cause and consequence, continuity and change, perspectives, and significance – covering the same underlying ideas in a revised structure, so both framings describe the same course philosophy rather than a change in what the subject is fundamentally about.

Briefly, in the specification’s current four-concept framing: cause and consequence asks why events happened and what resulted; continuity and change asks what stayed the same and what altered over a given period; perspectives asks whose viewpoint a source or account represents; and significance asks why a particular event, person or development matters, and by what criteria. All four recur across every paper and the internal assessment, whichever focused study, theme or (at HL) region a class has actually studied — for the fuller treatment of each, with the specific traps examiners look for, see the four concepts revision notes.

Aims

The course aims to enable students to:

• develop an understanding of, and continuing interest in, the past
• engage with multiple perspectives and appreciate the complex nature of historical concepts, issues, events and developments
• promote international-mindedness through the study of history from more than one region of the world
• develop an understanding of history as a discipline, including a sense of chronology, context and different historical perspectives.

How it’s assessed

DP History’s current course (first examined 2028) is assessed through a mix of source-based, essay and investigative work, weighted differently at SL and HL. At SL, external assessment is worth 70% of the final grade: Paper 1 (1 hour 15 minutes, worth 30%) asks students to work with historical sources linked to one of five focused-study options; Paper 2 (1 hour 45 minutes, worth 40%) requires a concept-based response plus an extended essay drawn from one of four thematic-study options. The remaining 30% is the internally assessed historical investigation, in which students formulate their own inquiry question, select and evaluate sources, and write up their findings – moderated externally by the IB.

HL students sit the same Paper 1 (now worth 20%) and Paper 2 (25%), plus a third paper (2 hours, worth 35%) requiring two essays on a chosen regional study, drawn from Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, or Europe. HL external assessment totals 80%, with the historical investigation worth the remaining 20%.

The course is structured around four inquiry contexts – focused study, thematic study, regional study and historical investigation – and four specified historical concepts: cause and consequence, continuity and change, perspectives, and significance. These concepts and contexts run through all three papers and the internal assessment, so a question on, say, historical significance might appear in the source analysis of Paper 1, the thematic essay of Paper 2, or the regional essay of Paper 3.

The syllabus’s structure

Beyond the four concepts and assessment weightings above, the course is built from a series of inquiry contexts, each with its own set of options a school chooses between:

Component	Hours	Who takes it	Choice
Focused study	50 (SL & HL)	All students	1 of 5 options (2 studies within it)
Thematic study	80 (SL & HL)	All students	1 of 4 themes
Regional study	90 (HL only)	HL only	1 of 4 regions (2 studies within it)
Historical investigation	20 (SL & HL)	All students	Student’s own topic

The five focused-study options are Independence and identity, Political and economic transitions, Conflict and displacement, Climate and innovation, and Protest and change; the four thematic-study options are Conflict, Innovation and transformation, Authoritarian rule, and Popular movements. HL’s regional study adds a further choice of region — Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, or Europe — making the regional study, at 90 hours, the single largest component in the HL course.

Because each school studies only one option within each of these contexts, confirming exactly which focused study, theme and (at HL) region your own class has covered is the essential first step before any content revision begins — the four assessed concepts are applied to whichever specific content was taught, not to the syllabus as a whole. For the full detail of what each option actually covers, and the recommended teaching-hour breakdown within each, see the syllabus guide; for the internal assessment process, see the historical investigation revision notes.

Source

International Baccalaureate Organization, History subject brief (Diploma Programme), 2020.