Eight steps to your Geography IA
You have been given the fieldwork question. You will collect the data together, in one day, on one river. Both of those things are normal, and neither of them is a problem.
How do the fluvial characteristics of a river change with distance from the source?
Everyone has this one. Step 1 unpacks what each part of it commits you to.
What follows is what to do with the rest of it, because nineteen of the twenty-five marks are earned after the fieldwork day, alone, from a dataset everybody shares.
Summer: your methodology, and your graphs and maps
Two things to bring back. A methodology of no more than 300 words, covering only the methods behind the data you are actually using — annotated photographs are the cheapest way to save words. And a set of data presentation methods showing at least five different skills, one of which must be a well-produced locational map.
The process
Each step produces something the next one needs. The word counts are what we suggest spending when you eventually write that section up, not necessarily what to write now.
The IB sets the 2,500-word total and nothing else, no section counts, no required order. The figures above are from our support booklet, and they leave 50 words in hand on purpose.
“If we all have the same question, what makes it mine?”
It is the first thing everybody asks, and the answer changes how you spend your time. The shared part of this investigation is worth six marks. The individual part is worth nineteen.
One fieldwork question for everybody, one day at the river, one set of readings. That is normal for river fieldwork and the IB expects it, information may be collected and exchanged as a group.
Which variables you use, which sites you keep, how you present them, what you explain, what you conclude, and how honestly you judge it. Criterion C (Quality and treatment of information collected) through to Criterion F (Evaluation): nineteen of the twenty-five marks.
The IB is explicit. Once the fieldwork is done, the writing, the justification of methods, the analysis and the conclusion must be entirely the work of the individual student.
The day at the river is not the investigation. It is the shortest part of it, and the least of the marks.
The Asse: 13.5 km, and a river people keep rebuilding
The Asse rises on the flank of the Dôle massif at the foot of the Jura and runs about 13.5 km into Lake Geneva. Only the final 5 km lie within the commune of Nyon, including the river's mouth. Our nine sites fall from 711 m to 413 m across just under 9 km of channel, close to the source down into the lower course, in one day, under the same flow conditions.
It is also a river that was engineered and is now being un-engineered. Reaches were straightened and confined long ago; since about 2019 a combined flood-protection and renaturation scheme has covered the roughly 4.5 km inside Nyon, with studies first and the first physical measures planned from about 2025 to 2026. A separate project reconnected the Calèves, a tributary diverted away decades earlier when the motorway was built, back into the Asse.
That matters more than it sounds. Where a channel has been rebuilt, its width, depth and gradient are partly a human decision rather than a product of distance from the source. It is the reason a site can refuse to fit your trend, and the reason you can often explain why, which is exactly what the top band of Criterion D (Written analysis) asks for.
| Site | Where | Altitude | From source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Near source | 711 m | 0.35 km |
| 2 | Corner of field | 540 m | 2.67 km |
| 3 | Other end of field | 540 m | 3.08 km |
| 4 | Next to road | 515 m | 4.32 km |
| 5 | Near Paleo | 458 m | 6.08 km |
| 6 | Behind Paleo | 454 m | 6.12 km |
| 7 | Lunch | 441 m | 7.92 km |
| 8 | Near the flats | 413 m | 9.07 km |
| 9 | Near the flats | 413 m | 9.28 km |
298 m of fall across 8.9 km, at a mean gradient of 3.3%. Note how uneven the spacing is: 2.3 km between the first two, and 40 m between sites 5 and 6. The list changes from year to year, so check it against the sheet you are given on the day.
Where these reports actually lose marks
Six things, none of them about effort. Each one is dealt with properly on the step it belongs to; this is the short version, so you know what you are avoiding before you start.
How to use this guide
Work through the steps in order. Each opens with what you should be arriving with and closes with a checklist, and the checklist is the point rather than the decoration; it is the only part that asks about your investigation rather than explaining things in general.
Tick honestly. An untickable box is not a mark against you, it is simply the next thing to go and do. If you are signed in, your ticks are saved and your teacher can see how far along you are; they see your progress, never what you have written.
One thing before you start
You get one round of written feedback on a full draft. Your teacher can say what is strong and what is weak, but they cannot correct it, and the next version you hand over is the final one.
So hand over something complete rather than something polished, because feedback on four finished sections and two missing ones is feedback on four sections. And write it in a Google Document shared with your teacher from the start: in an investigation where the question and the data are shared with the whole class, a version history showing your report being built is the best evidence there is that the writing is yours.
Everyone has the same question. Step 1 is about what that means for where the marks actually are, and about turning one broad question into hypotheses you can test.
Start step 1Anything marked “our river” is specific to the fieldwork we do together on the River Asse at Nyon: the sites, the equipment and the way we collect the data. Site coordinates and altitudes are from our own fieldwork records and the exact list can change from year to year, so check them against the sheet you are given on the day. Photographs are the author’s own, taken at the river.