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Section checklist:

This is an overall checklist of all the sections and ‘extras’ that you need to include in your project. Tick them off as you complete them

REMEMBER:

Leave the contents page until last as you need to number all the pages first!

Section Heading / Completed
Title page (including name, candidate number and title of your project
Contents (list all your sections and give the page numbers)
Introduction and aims
Data Collection (method or methodology)
Data Presentation (graphs, tables, photographs, diagrams)
Analysis (explaining what your results show)
Conclusion (your overall findings)
Bibliography (list of books and websites you used)
Acknowledgements (people who helped you)
Appendix (your raw data and any leaflets, fliers etc.)

COMMON QUESTIONS:

WHO AM I ALLOWED TO ASK FOR HELP?

You can speak to your teachers who will suggest ideas on how to carry out your investigation.

You can ask your teacher to read your work and provide feedback and ideas on how to improve

They CANNOT write your project or tell you what to say!

HOW LONG IS THE PROJECT?

Depending on your exam board (check with your teacher or look at the relevant web site for info) they are normally between 1500 and 2500 words. Each section should be approximately 500 words in length.

WHAT IS IT WORTH?

Most GCSE Geography projects are worth 25% of your final mark – again check your exam board website or ask your teacher. If your coursework is good it can make the difference between grades in your final exam. This could mean the difference between a ‘B’ grade and an ‘A’ grade.

WHAT ABOUT ICT?

Most exam boards require you to do some work using ICT this can be graphs, writing, using digital images, using maps or scanning photographs. Aim to include at least 3 TO 4 elements of ICT in your project.

REMEMBER: You must produce SOME hand drawn work – e.g. maps, graphs or field sketches.

WHAT IS A BIBLIOGRAPHY?

It is a list of books that you have used (an example is below)

Author Date Book Title Publisher

Widdowson, J. 2003 Earthworks 3 Murray

You must also include a list of websites you have used.

HOW SHOULD I PRESENT MY PROJECT?

Neatly! You must place your work in a plain cardboard or plastic folder. Not in large A4 folders and definitely no individual plastic sheets.

WHAT ABOUT THE TITLE AND SECTION HEADINGS?

It makes it easier for the marker if you have a separate heading page for each section:


SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION

There are four parts to your introduction:

Aim:

What is your overall aim of the project?

The main aim of this investigation is to discover whether tourism has a negative impact on Lulworth Cove.

Hypotheses:

Individual statements that you hope to test e.g. and how you are going to test them

Lulworth Cove has a large sphere of influence which I will test by carrying out 75 questionnaires.

You then need to explain each of these:

This is because Lulworth is part of the famous Jurassic Coastline and is a physical honey pot for visitors therefore I believe that people will travel a long way in order to experience its beauty.

Location:

Describe the area you are studying

·  Where – use road names, maps, direction, places it is close to.

·  Physical features – what is the area like – rocky, undulating, mild climate etc

·  Draw a map pinpointing the location

Background:

A brief history or background of your location:

Lulworth Cove has recently been placed into the World Heritage Jurassic Coastline, this will hopefully sustain and preserve the areas outstanding beauty for years to come and also act as a pull to visitors. It has been a popular tourist attraction since the beginning of the nineteenth century when the advent of the motor car allowed day trippers to easily access the area.

SECTION TWO: DATA COLLECTION

In this Chapter you must describe in detail how you collected the data on your fieldwork day.

For every method, you must include the following information:

Ø  What you did

Ø  Why you did it

Ø  How it relates to meeting the coursework aims

Ø  What the strengths and weaknesses are

Ø  What data tables or collection record sheets you used and why

You could present this in a table:

What / Where / Why / When / Limitations
Questionnaire
You must explain why you asked each question e.g. ‘Where have you travelled from today?’ We asked this in order to find out how large Lulworth sphere of influence was. / At 50 different locations around Lulworth Cove (see map for study area) / In order to find out people’s opinions on tourism / Friday July 10th 2007 between 12 and 2pm / We worked in groups of 3 for safety and as there many other groups working at the same there was a danger of asking the same person twice. It was a school day and therefore not as bus as it would have been in the summer holidays. We only had a limited amount of time to collect answers.

SECTION THREE: DATA PRESENTATION & ANALYSIS

This is where you get a chance to show of your ICT (computer) skills, in order to get high marks you need to use a variety of graphs and methods. Choose the most appropriate for your study. Use at least 4 different methods to show your data.

1. Bar Graph (good for traffic surveys or questionnaires)

2.  Pie Chart (good for people’s opinions on questionnaires)

3.  Radar Graph (good for environmental quality scores)

4.  Annotated photographs

5.  Statistical Maps (good for showing amounts of people in an area)

/ Choropleth (colour shaded) maps. This is the most common type, and is especially appropriate for showing standardized data such as rates, densities or percentages. A different colour is used for each of a number of bands, allowing users to identify which areas have high, low or middling values.
/ Proportional symbol maps. These use symbols that are proportional in size to the values they represent, such that the biggest symbol will fall in the area with the highest value. Symbols can include circles, bars, or objects indicating what is being measured. This type of map is better for count data.
/ Dot maps. Individual events or groups of events are marked with a dot, allowing users to geographic patterns such as clusters. The most famous use of this technique was by Dr John Snow, who mapped cholera deaths in an outbreak in London in 1854 and was able to show that they were concentrated around a particular water pump.*

6.  Scatter graph (to explore the relationship between tow variables e.g. width and depth of a stream)

7.  Cross Section (good for rivers or depth of erosion)

8.  Spearman’s Rank

This is designed to discover whether there is a relationship between 2 pieces of data. For example is there a relationship between the width and depth of a river. See the following page for a complete explanation and worked example.

http://geographyfieldwork.com/SpearmansRank.htm

For each of your graphs you must describe what it shows:

Graph one shows that

4: CONCLUSION

This is a one page summary of what you found out in your study – summarising the conclusions you have made from your data presentation and analysis.

·  Go through each aim or hypotheses in turn

·  State whether you proved or disproved it or answered the question

·  Which graphs or data tables/maps etc back your answer up

·  Say whether it supports the theory that you mentioned in the first chapter. E.g. if you are looking at rivers did your river fit the model developed by Bradshaw.

Example: Hypothesis 1

The effect of tourism on Lulworth brings both positive and negative effects

This hypothesis was proved correct graph 1 proved that 84% of visitors believed the impacts of tourism were mainly positive, this was backed up in graph 2 where they cited the management of footpaths and the introduction of a visitor centre as having a positive effect on the environment. Pictures 4, 5 & 6 however, highlighted the negative impacts of tourism such as litter in the car park and graffiti on the beautiful natural arch of Durdle Door. This supports the theory put forward by Nagle who believes that tourism is am mixed blessing to areas of outstanding natural beauty.

You need an overall final paragraph that sums up your findings:

Overall the effects of tourism on Lulworth Cove were largely negative – out of the six methods I investigated 4 of them were negative….

5. EVALUATION

·  You need to describe any limitations in your methods

·  How the limitation in the method will have affected your results (refer to actual graphs and points on graphs that may have been affected)

·  How the limitation in the method will have affected your conclusions (refer to actual conclusions and hypothesis)

·  Explain if and how you could eliminate this limitation in an ideal world/if you did the project again

Limitation in methodology / How this affected my results / How this affected my conclusion / Possible ways to eliminate the limitation if the project was repeated
To measure the depth of the river at each point, I took an average of just three depth measurements only. If one of these points was measured inaccurately, or was an anomaly (e.g. due to there being a large boulder on the river bed!) then the average depth might have been inaccurate. / As graph 3 shows, I did not find that depth increased as you went downstream. In particular, the depth at site 1 was greater than at any of the others (see circled cross on graph 3). This was probably because of one of the three depth measurements was vastly different from the others and was an inaccurate measurement. / I concluded that depth did not increase downstream. This conclusion may be false and may just be caused by my inaccurate measurement at site 1. / I could take many more (10) measurements of depth across the river and average these. This means any one inaccurate measurement would have less of an affect on the overall average.