Extended Essay: Reflections

The First Formal Reflection Session

This is a student-led 20-30 minute session. Please make sure to set an appointment with your supervisor. 

Here are some ideas and questions to help you plan your session:

Start by talking about your research question: 

• What is your research question? Are you happy with the phrasing (particularly after your background reading)? Can it be narrowed down or improved? 

• Why is the topic worthy of investigation? Can you point to any facts from relevant academic sources to help you prove it’s worthiness? 

• Why is this question personally important to you?

• Was there a specific conversation, book, news report or other source that helped you narrow your focus or decide on your question? Explain.

Next:

• Group 1 & 2 subjects - Discuss the readings that you have completed:

  • Have you conducted additional background reading? What have you learned from this reading?

  • Have you read your book(s)? Or for Category 3, collected appropriate artifacts that you can share!? 

  • Are there any emerging arguments?

  • Use your outline! 

  • Share your annotations, quotes, ideas!

• Groups 3,4 & 5 subjects - Discuss your conceptual/theoretical understandings/groundings & the methods/materials that you are using or plan to use to collect information:

  • Have you done any additional background reading? What have you learned from this reading?

  • What is the theoretical or conceptual grounding from the discipline that you will apply in your investigation? How varied are your sources? Can you add any more? 

  • How do you plan to investigate (gather information) your research question? What methods will you use?

  • If applicable, have you written interview, survey questions that you can share during this session? *This is very important in subjects like geography or economics! How large will your sample be? How will you analyze the answers? Will you run statistical analysis? Which one? Why? 

  • What kind of reasoned argument do you expect to be able derive from your sources? What are the perspectives? Who are the stakeholders?  

  • What do you see as your biggest challenge as you begin this process?  How do you hope to address this challenge?

Finally, discuss your next steps:

Talk about what you plan to accomplish and how you plan to accomplish it.

In critically reviewing your engagement in the research process, it might help to think in terms of three levels of reflection: descriptive, analytical and evaluative reflection. The table below gives some examples of guiding questions to help with this.