welcome to this video that aims to take you through how to approach various the various different types of questions paper for alternative coursework as part for part of the cambridge igcse geography course so this video really is an introduction to paper four and it will break down the various different sections and offer you guidance and hints and tips of the sorts of things that you need to include and consider when answering these questions now i'll be producing other videos throughout the year that will go through the different investigations in more detail so for example the next one i'm hoping to produce is one on the rivers and so i'll take you through how to how to um approach paper for river questions so i'll be taking you through um the various different methods that you'll be expected to know uh what sort of points you need to make and things like that now with paper four it's impossible to cover every aspect sometimes they will throw in new investigations there are different there's always different ways of presenting the data of word and data so though i'll give you um some more the more accessible questions in my examples really it's down to you to practice practice practice so what is paper form really is the alternative the coursework some of you might have um started doing a course book which is where you write a formal investigation but however your school for whatever reason has decided to offer for you to do paper for and really it seems to be an alternative to that so it's out of 60 and instead of you doing a 60 mark investigation in one location you will be answering two by 30 mark questions both questions are compulsory the exams last 90 minutes generally speaking one of the questions will be on a human investigation the other will be on a physical investigation so something on rivers or coasts and question type can appear in any order and what i mean by that is that because this is alternative to coursework um and it's out of 60 what they do is as you can see here i've put the mark boundaries for the course of paper component 3. you've got 12 marks for introduction 12 marks for realization collection data etc in the alternative coursework paper the types of questions they may ask to add up to 12 marks might be to get you to write a hypothesis to find some key terms answer questions that link to theory and skills study for paper 1 and two for data collection which is a very common question to ask they might require you to think about some risks associated with this investigation they're writing about in the paper be able to distinguish between primary and secondary data sampling techniques and perhaps for five or six marks how to collect a piece of data to help you to enable a student to answer i've hypothesis or investigate a hypothesis as well you might be asked to complete or draw a range of graphs you might be aware of a range of digital presentation terms and techniques as well so you might be having to say why could a chlorophyll might be better use a better presentation technique to answer this question and things like that and this is where praxis comes in because it's impossible really for me to show you and to take you through how to aunt how to draw and construct each type of graph way of presenting data so this is when you need to practice 12 marks might be to state if the data shown in the exam proves or disproves the hypothesis and explain or suggest reasons why and then you might be asked to talk consider advances and disadvantages of using a technique to to collect data and perhaps suggest improvement so really the questions they ask very much reflect what you are expected to do and demonstrate in their piece of coursework however please bear in mind that it's not as the exam starts off again the first couple of questions about the introduction then next about data collection etc these types of questions can appear in anywhere in the paper so one question might be weighted more heavily on data collection and then the other question on the other investigation might be more about data presentation techniques um so practice does make perfect so you so there is a lot of content to know however there are tricks hence this video of how you can approach this video oh sorry how you can approach this investigation so what i'm going to do is now is take you through each of those sections that make up the mark scheme for alternative coursework and so you can use the chapters then to move on to the various um different sections to help you approach them if you are answering uh if you're using past papers and you're answering past questions and them in this video so like i said interaction star questions ask you to construct hypotheses and apply theory and skills so hypotheses what are they on the left you can see a whole range of different hypotheses there from a range of different past papers and what you can see at the bottom is i put links to the various past questions to help you with this so a hypothesis is a prediction of what you think your data will show so it's something you make before you go out and collect the data before you decide what methods you want to make generally speaking you base it on geographical theory and you assume they are true but you also have the back in mind that for whatever reason it could come out to be false like i said it's based on geographical theory so for example a common one for river investigation is the branch of model which shows how various characteristics of the river should change with distance downstream and hypothesis should do one of the following state how something will change along a transect road river compare two time periods or two locations comparing a before and after and like i said compare two locations and state if there's a relationship negative positive between two variables or simply a statement so if you can see on the left hand side you can see i've given you provided you with a range of different examples of what a hypothesis could look like so when you're writing hypothesis this question asks you to do uh you need to remember this so remember hypothesis a prediction of what you think your data will show so here's a nice simple one might investigate through investigation do not refer to pollution describe a failed method to test this hypothesis so this is river investigation so you're thinking um right bradshaw models perhaps a good one now remember if you cannot remember how to write a hypothesis read through the exam paper there might there will certainly be other examples of what a hypothesis looks like so again read through the exam paper to refresh your mind of the type of language that you should use in this particular case it's river so keep it simple as something a characteristic of that river in this case velocity should either increase or decrease with distance downstream and in this case if it's velocity the velocity should increase with distance downstream and here we go and hear what the masking would look like so you get one mark for stating channel width increases downstream etc etc so let's look at some types of questions i remember these tend to be anywhere between two and four mark star questions here's one from a coast investigation explain why destructive ways of road beaches and constructive waves deposit material and here's another one which of the following features below is labeled x on figure one so there might be a figure 1.1 there might be an insert so you have to identify the feature kind of pick two and then talk about tick which three of the following statements about longshore drift are correct so again um it does require you to have some knowledge of the background information about why a hypothesis is true or yet why the hypothesis might be true so you do have to have that understanding of the theory behind it some more questions here here is asking you to talk about characteristics of constructive and destructive waves talk about um what groin is uh suggest two reasons why water pollution levels might vary along the river and here simple definitions uh matching a sentence so a whole range of questions and like i said set anywhere between one to four marks typically two to four marks some more for in human investigation um you can see here defining the same squat assessments a few map skills here looking for scale describe distribution squat sentiments very much paper two star questions uh give two reasons to explain the location of squat assessments in the city linking to some background theory and again uh some more settlement style questions as well so you know all of these add up to about each of them from different papers add up to about six marks and six marks again so if you have a good solid understanding of the geographical theory behind each investigation then really these should be quite straightforward marks and again that comes with making sure you have the very good revision for paper one lots of practice for paper two as well and for paper four using the mark scheme looking carefully at the mark scheme and incorporating the points into your revision notes and just to finalize uh here we go some you know advantages and disadvantages are constructing a bypass rate around the video so a lot of this is um linking back to theory as well so remember most these questions relate to skills and knowledge required for people one and two if and short use common sense think about it think about examples that you've experienced or you've read about practice and do incorporate math schemes and phrases and definitions into your answers into your notes when you revise okay so moving on to uh chapter two this is a coursework data collection skills here this these questions could ask you uh questions on a whole range of different aspects in terms of sampling techniques and time types of data why would you apply study risk assessments and describing the various methods so let's go through the media at one point so sampling here's a hypothesis students decided to test the following hypothesis can we actually think about this ask every tourist who goes to malta that's impossible to do it would take far too much time money you would have to have a huge variety of people that are manning the ports and airports to make sure every person's asked again inquiring a lot of people so obviously we can't do that so that's why we have to be selected but when we sample we have to be certain that what and where we collect will be enough to allow us to make a conclusion be enough will enable us to collect enough data to prove or disprove our our hypothesis so how can we do this sampling now just before we go um you might hear this term transects not really a transit particularly applies uh when we um are selecting a road you might prefer that this is a trans textbook straight line and then you have study sites that's kind of like where we've collected our um our data from so just have those in the back of your mind those two terms there so one very popular form of sampling is what we call systematic sampling so this is where observations are taken at regular intervals so for example we ask every fifth person so here we go and now i'm going to ask the fifth person and i'm going to continue answering this fifth person so on and so on until i collect i'm like 10 ask 10 30 40 different people random sampling on the other hand as it says everyone has an equal chance of being selected so you might literally just point out people that are willing to stop and answer a question you might have some sort of computer model that doles out some numbers and that is your distance downstream so here for example these are my random p i have asked early on to ask randomly stratify something on the other hand is when i sort of define decide uh i'm going to categorize people or get some various locations i'm going to group them together and i'm going to select a certain number of people from each particular group or age range or section of a river and things like that now you can combine different uh sampling techniques so this is what we call stratified random sampling so i'm rounding to select people from different groups doesn't matter who i'm going to randomly select them on the other hand we've got stratified systematic sampling whereas i think regular samples are taken from within certain categories in this case the third person of each group and here on this slide what i've done is to try to summarize the main advantages and disadvantages of using these different techniques now there are still some more things to consider so for example um you need to make sure that your sample size is large enough to give you a more accurate representation of the whole group that you're trying to target the river and the location you're carrying out your study in sample size needs to take into account um the amount of time energy money labor equipment you have available to you you need to also consider can you actually access these locations safely and your data collector needs to avoid buyers so for example if you're doing a questionnaire you need to make sure that it doesn't favor one person group or an opinion and if it does this is something that then you need to put into your evaluation so you've chosen your sites you've done you've chosen the most accurate sample size and remember uh just let you know that i'll be going through each investigation in separate videos um so please if you do want those um then depending on the investigation you might want to you might prefer a different sampling technique so please do make sure that you watch those videos and to get an understanding of which sampling technique is perhaps more appropriate for a different for the different types of investigations so uh in terms of sample size um this one's quite a nice question for you to do uh so you can have a look at why example 20 people's too small a sample 500 is too big and again um you need to be clear on what makes an appropriate sample size so think about urban area have you covered enough of the city do you have enough sites along the river to show change how many do you need for a questionnaire and these are the various points that you could consider so what do sampling questions look like here's one for you um society test the following hypotheses name and sampling method that students could use to select people to answer their questionnaire explain why you chose this method so really these type of questions often it doesn't really matter which one you select but it has you have to explain the rationale behind your choice and perhaps that's the most important part so here i've given you an overview of what the mark scheme says and to be honest these are the type of points that you need to include into your notes because it takes you through why each of these methods the benefits of selecting each of these different sampling techniques typically it's best just to do one don't combine them and these are the points you need to make so again incorporate these into your revision notes um i've given you some more questions here why did researchers need to use a sample of people this justifies why we have to have a sample um primary and secondary data what the difference is and we'll go into that later scheme there for you um sometimes it might actually ask you to look at the disadvantages that you see in this question here so again um i've given you some reasons why uh this particular method questionnaire could is if you use a random sampling or target a particular population what's the bad points so again go back to the previous video and again you need to justify um how you can select a representative sample of people and again here i've given you some more um strengths and weaknesses sorry strengths of using the different techniques that you can incorporate so remember you need to be clear on the following why we sample type sampling and the advantages of disadvantages of using each sampling method and how they apply to different investigations for you to be able to show me and the examiner which is the most appropriate one so as mentioned in the previous question you might be required to understand the difference between primary and secondary um there's quite some good clear differences and i've tried to summarize what they are some examples for you in this table for you to incorporate but essentially primary is something that you have gone out and collected it's real it's up to date it's in that moment where secondary is tend to be you using data that's already been collected so you've also seen this primary and secondary data there's also what we call qualitative and quantitative again differences are summarized in the table but essentially quantitative is data that can easily be uh classified into numbers or it gives you the amount so for example how old are you it's a single response or a very short response where it's qualitative it's where your is can't really be measured in numbers you have to go out and you collect opinions on something and you might take a photograph and so really it is um yeah it is it's an opinion it's something that you have to get and then you have to sit through and you gonna sort of key themes out from those opinions so whereas quantitative quickly provides you with um an overview qualitative it takes more time to analyze and again here here are the types of questions that could be asked typically very short ones but again if you know the difference if you understand what there is very straightforward marks to get so primary data it's this secondary data you can see the response is there so again pause the video use those marks incorporate them into your notes another thing you might be asked to do is to think about risk assessment any investigation doesn't carry an element of risk a lot of these questions are common sense you just need to think about it and more often or not the answer is straightforward you could be collecting this data in the winter you get colds so how can you avoid colds and hypothermia setting in you put on a jumper so when we consider risks and how we can go about minimizing them key risk of things as i mentioned temperature the fact that the weather could suddenly change you might be in the sea and there's the tides you could slip is it safe to access the particular locations if you accidentally drank the water could you get ill could you be an area that suffers from crime time of day obviously collecting investigations at night does carry some sort of risk is there traffic implications and could you get lost so these are all the types of risks very broadly that could apply to any investigation and again watch the other videos um to sort of think about which ones tend to be more appropriate to the various different types obviously if you're doing an urban study ties might not be an issue um if you're doing an urban study if you're doing a river investigation potentially traffic might not be an issue if you are just walking along the river so these are all the various things to consider so what the questions look like here we go um complete the table by suggesting different ways to reduce these possible risks you know how can you avoid slipping on rocks how can you avoid getting an illness or disease from the river water things like that so if you look at the mark scheme how can you avoid slipping on the rocks of the river you wear sensible shoes protective footwear getting a disease from the river water will simply avoid drinking it falling into the river in working groups avoid steeple slippery soaps things like that so a lot of it's common sense um again some more ways you can do it from a river again here the type of things to consider so really think about it um this is a different one uh a sign i can never imagine a sign like disappearing the coast can be a dangerous place so what advice could the teacher give you or instructions would a teacher give you these are type of things and again here you might be asked actually you know when you do a risk assessment often you we have to predict the likelihood of that risk from happening and how severe it could be if that risk does occur and they might ask you to do a calculation here or identify which one has the greater risk so here hyperthermia setting in because it carries the larger number so lots of things to consider and again another one things that the fact this might actually think about the risk associated with selecting various sites and again here i've given you the um the mark scheme of the type of things that you might need to consider so general points about risk assessments really think about it is it accessible can you safely get there is it safe to operate in what could weather conditions occur and are there other hazards like traffic and people and things like that another thing that we do before we decide about how to go out and collect the data is carry out a pilot study and pilot study is done before the main investigation it enables us to decide can a full scale study take place so things that we might can do we might actually go out and visit those sites we might trial the methods to see are they safe and accessible do we require any additional costs and resources do we need more staff do we need bigger groups or smaller groups do we need a coach for example do we need to stay overnight it also enables the students and teachers to familiarize yourself with the equipment that has to be used and so we can proofread and trial those methods here's a question for example before the students studied began working at the five fieldwork sites they did a pilot study what is a pilot study and give one reason for doing this so here we go and these are a nice summary question that you can apply to pretty much most um investigations and remember in the other videos i will have um i'll talk about what sort of things although these are general points i'll be asked i'll be showing you one or two things to consider when doing a pilot study uh specifically for those different investigations the next types of questions that you could be asked the ones that are perhaps the most difficult out of the whole paper i would argue and carry in many ways the most marks these can range anywhere from three to five marks so there are two types of questions here first type of question these are the ones that typically work about four marks you describe how you can collect data for the different investigations so the exam question might give you a hypothesis and you have to explain sorry describe how you go about collecting data to prove that hypothesis so it does require you to have knowledge of equipment and be able to write in a step-by-step way so that's really quite difficult because you have to be quite concise and the second type of questions attached to these just tend to discuss the reliability of different methods so what was good about the investigation where are the weaknesses how could that reliability be improved now in geography in these papers there are a huge range of different methods that you need to be aware of and so i'm going to give you in this video general points that can apply to all and by watching the other videos you can see why i go into a lot more detail about the various different methods so what methods do you need to know for rivers you need to know how to calculate the width and we'll find out the width and depth and then from those calculations how to then do the cross-sectional area how to calculate the velocity the discharge the wetted perimeter size and shape of sediments gradients and these are ones i have seen but these have only been one off so how you go about with the water pollution oxygen levels now typically the ones standing out are the ones where you do need to know the other ones they will more likely give you sort of a step by step of how to calculate it so it really depends and again that's where practice comes in now for coasts you need to calculate the size and shape of sediments the amount of material vegetation animals within the area the wave frequency and the beach profile so perhaps the physical geography are the ones that carry the most um other perhaps the hardest to know because there are a lot more equipments and they're very specific to that particular investigation whereas in human investigations this could be anything from a tourism to a population to a session investigation questionnaire is really important land use but how to calculate pedestrian traffic counts bipolar environmental survey pollution levels and microclimates and i made another video about this but again this is perhaps a very technical one that again through lots of practice will help you how to calculate temperature cloud cover wind speeds pressure sunshine so you can see that there is huge variety in what you need to learn and again you have no choice in which questions come up you have to answer the paper that's in front of you but if you look at the mark scheme there are certain things that you can mention um that should help you with the marks so if i just take a little bit here so for example you might want to get to groups or decide who surveys at your sites you might want to choose a variety of sites along the river you do need to record your results so the first one very good point you could make mention is record those points on our recording sheets so what to include and this is probably the step-by-step guide of the certain things you should be aiming to include that should hopefully get you at least out of five marks if you have to write a hypothesis certainly at least two to three marks so before you start i would bullet point the equipment you need margins i would then start off writing your answer saying students need to get into groups and decide who surveys each site or who will carry out what then you need to write an order using the equipment you've put a point on the list how to go about collecting that data so you need to include the equipment timings who does what after that you need to state clearly how long you'll collect the data for at each site state that the results will need to be written down on the recording sheets and repeat this method at several points at the same site to get an average and repeat at different sites along with transact you could also include about the idea that you collect at different times throughout the day so once you've done those we now need to move on to evaluation style questions this is where you discuss the strengths weaknesses and improvements and like i said in every single i will put together a whole series videos on the different investigations rivers coast et cetera so please do watch those because they will go into specific strengths and weaknesses and improvements and the various methods but these are just general things to consider so these are types of questions that you'd be asked in terms of dealing with the weaknesses of difficulties and carrying out something you've got here your questionnaires and to do the traffic survey and if you look at the mark scheme again there are some certain generic conditions that you can consider safety do people understand the weather how can you know health risks and things like that so again this just think it has a little bit of common sense when it comes to these type of investigations now as i said when i go into the human investigation methods a bit more detail um i'll give specific points but you can see here again if you're unsure really think about a little bit of common sense put yourself into that position think could you ask everyone could you do people understand and things like that this is to do with um velocity measurements look at the method what could there be certain issues collecting this data so here maybe using floats well it could get stuck it could be an error in calculation um moving the straight line weather conditions so general points to consider about the weaknesses with your method weather conditions how could that affect it obstacles was there anything in the way could that even be like a traffic jam or some road works human error did you could you agree as a group did the people you were interviewing understand the question all various points to consider now sometimes when considering the strengths of the particular investigation and this can actually help you consider also the weaknesses so here i've just put a range of examples talking about um how can they become more reliable so what could make it stronger um how could they uh again similar question here about you changing the methods and gaining questions about advantages and disadvantages so when i talk about strengths really i'm also talking about how could why was the method good or how can it become more reliable so if we look at the various mark schemes here you can see there are again some various common points to mention um you could talk about taking an average maybe collecting a digital um instrument why is digital better um and think about the reasons there is there's no anchor beard and in terms of like what it's written is what i write so there might not be any um confusion between people and things like that it might be easier to use so again it's considering um what you are what you have and how and maybe why is that good and how it can become more reliable and again my various videos i will produce talk about each method in a little bit more detail so some general points to consider about how you but why is strong or how can become more reliable what's the data or is the data easier to collect are people working in groups were enough sites selected with an area or along the transect was it on the same day was the average calculated does the method select does it enable change to be shown what's buy-ins minimized and things like that so it's really can these are the points that really will help you consider was my method good or how it can be improved to increase its reliability now this question these questions sorry might not necessarily talk about the strengths they could also talk about maybe this reliability but actually specific improvements to a particular method so it's a slight difference and with these um this talks about average maybe doing a pilot study so again it's linking back to everything that you've done so general points about these particular questions can you take more measures and calculate averages um can you repeat at different times and compare who's to work in groups collect more data and increase the number of sites was there an alternative methods was there a digital alternative so these are the various things that you need to consider when actually looking at specific improvements so again when you revise look at each method that you've got think about the strengths weaknesses and how can the reliability or how can that method be changed to make improvements so yes reliability and improvements are similar but whereas i would say these improvements actually looking at how you would totally change that particular method or maybe find an alternative next section that you get assessed on is data presentation questions this is pretty much where you could be given examples and you have to complete these out of 12 marks these are really straightforward 12 months to get it's almost impossible for me to go through and talk about all the different techniques that they could be there as i'm about to show you so really this is a case and i know i've said this quite a lot but it's true of practice practice practice so for example you might have to complete a simple scatter graph pie charts um calculate some octazes complete a line graph complete a cross-sectional graph put some flow lines in triangular graph um a radar graph land use do some calculations for more calculations so there are so much variation that could be asked um but they are quite sneaky because often they are written in between huge graphs a huge block paragraph so please do not miss them my advice to you is look at examples drawn or calculated and copy exactly how they've drawn theirs use a pencil and do practice straightforward 12 marks 20 of your paper please do not miss them and the final one is pretty much the data analysis and conclusion where you've gone about collecting the data and you now need to see that data shown proves or disproves your hypothesis five marks and again there are some key things that you need to write to guarantee some marks which i'll go through now so here's one for example hypothesis one the rate of penetration increases as you go further down the lake from the lake sorry look at the data um which one has proven that here we go hypothesis to support your decision with evidence from the various data and another one so typically with these questions you are required to use the data specifically collected and you must include evidence from that and again here's a final one so generally speaking whenever you do this unless specifically written you must um use the data from those particular resources so figure one or table one and if you notice there are four marks sometimes three but generally four and there is a certain way that you need to answer this so first thing you need to do is state if the hypothesis is true partly true or false it is obvious if it's true obvious if it's false if it's not then it's probably in the middle so it's partly true so you need to take time to think about that and if you look at the marks again which i'll show you here again you get one mark for stating if it's true or partially true or false so again that's something the first thing you need to write is that and then you need to pick out the key evidence that supports your statements so before you before you start writing read the question carefully what is the hypothesis trying to improve does the question state the hypothesis is true or not so sometimes you might say hypothesis 2 has been proven to be true use evidence to suggest why look at data does it prove it if it does it's true partially true or false and then state the hypothesis statement of the hypothesis through partially true or false is the first sentence you write unless you've been told otherwise that is the first thing you write unless you've been told otherwise or you tick a box or something like that and then you find and write evidence to support your view again something that comes to practice and you can see that you've got some evidence there again guarantees you at least two marks so go out first thing you write is unless stated otherwise it says it's true partially true or false and then use the evidence unless stated otherwise to say why so over to you this video really was just general guidance for how to approach these questions i will be publishing more videos that go into specific methods and investigations but this particular paper practice does make perfect um so do watch the other videos to find out more about the different investigations and please subscribe and share thank you for listening