Tag: commentaries

Economics Internal Assessment, IB Economics

Step Five – Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation

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IB Economics. If you want top grades in your coursework, you need to be able to prove skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Commentaries that just describe or restate the information in the article, tend to get low marks. These skills are difficult to do and take time and practice to acquire. What is analysis? When you analyze something, you look at it in a lot of detail, you break it down into it’s component parts and try and make links or connections between the different parts. What is synthesis? A summary of the available information that you have – … Continue reading Step Five – Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation

Economics Internal Assessment, IB Economics1 Comment

Step Four – Including Diagrams.

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IB Economics. Diagrams are essential to economics. When you draw a diagram to explain or illustrate an economics situation, you are demonstrating your ‘ application’ skills – applying the theory we learn in class to explain or illustrate an economic situation. If you want top marks for your coursework, your diagram have to be excellent. The following are a list of rules to follow:- 1)  Diagrams should be large –  around one-third of a page in size. 2)     Always label the axes appropriately – eg  “Price of Cars” , not just “Price”  and “Quantity of Oil (Barrels per Year) ” … Continue reading Step Four – Including Diagrams.

Economics Internal Assessment, IB Economics

Step Three – Writing Up Your Commentary

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IB Economics. The maximum word count for each commentary is 800 words. It is vitally important to write as close as possible up to this limit i.e. 799 words! In order to maximize your marks, you will have to do a lot of things – write an introduction and conclusion, draw one or two diagrams, explain and describe each one, define some economic terms and concepts that you are using, directly refer to the article etc. All of this takes up a lot of your word count! For this reason, make sure you use as much of your word count … Continue reading Step Three – Writing Up Your Commentary

Economics Internal Assessment, IB Economics

Step Two – Using Good Article Sources

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IB Economics. Your article sources must be news media sources, containing the latest news about an economics issue. Remember: you cannot use the same source for more than one commentary. Each source should be different for each commentary. I tell my students to use these sources, amongst others:- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/    https://edition.cnn.com/business   https://www.bbc.com/news/business   http://www.independent.co.uk    http://www.guardian.co.uk   http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html   https://www.reuters.com/       Notice something. The Economist magazine and the Financial Times are not on the above list. It is not recommended that you choose articles from these publications because they already analyse and evaluate the economic situation that they … Continue reading Step Two – Using Good Article Sources

Economics Internal Assessment, IB Economics

Step One – Finding a Good Article.

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IB Economics. One of the first mistakes students new to economics make is to choose an inappropriate article for their commentary. So the first thing that you need to do is to find a good one. I give my students this checklist to help them, when they are looking for articles:- Commentary Checklist When looking for commentary articles, you need to take the following into consideration:- Is the article a recent one? It must be no older than a year from today’s date.  Is the article not too lengthy? About a page or a page and a half of A4 … Continue reading Step One – Finding a Good Article.