Evaluating your inquiry
What the standard asks the evaluation to do
- Three things are named: the strengths and weaknesses of the inquiry, problems with the reliability of the evidence, and an assessment of the process overall.
- The subject is the inquiry, not the topic. Your evaluation is about the investigation you carried out, not about the history you found.
- It is one of the four assessed stages, and it is the one most often written in the last twenty minutes as a paragraph about time management.
- Everything the evaluation needs was generated in the earlier stages, if those stages were done properly. A thin evaluation is usually a symptom, not a cause.
What belongs in it, and what does not
- Belongs: which of your focusing questions you could answer and which you could not; which sources you could not obtain; disagreements you could not resolve; where your evidence base was thin or one-sided; what you would search differently.
- Belongs: how the inquiry changed as it went — a question revised, a source found late that shifted a conclusion.
- Does not belong: how long it took, how hard it was, or how much you enjoyed it. These are about you, not about the inquiry.
- Does not belong: a summary of what you found. That is the topic again, and it has already been assessed elsewhere.
- The test: every sentence should have your inquiry or your evidence as its subject.
Evaluating reliability across the whole evidence base
- You have already judged individual sources in your annotations. The evaluation judges the set.
- Ask four questions of the whole set:
- Is it varied? How many genuinely different kinds of source, and which category was empty?
- Is it independent? How many sources share a creator, an institution or a gatekeeper?
- Is it balanced? Whose account is over-represented, and whose is missing entirely?
- Is it verifiable? Could someone else find and check everything you used?
- The most valuable answer is usually about who is missing. Archives are denser around institutions and the literate, so most school inquiries are stronger on official decisions than on the people affected by them. Naming that precisely is a real finding about your evidence.
Saying what you could not establish
- This is the highest-value sentence in the evaluation, and it has three parts: what you could not establish, what would have settled it, and whether that evidence exists.
- I could not establish how much of the nine-year delay was caused by the site dispute rather than by fundraising. The fund's accounts would have settled it; the museum holds none, and I could not confirm whether the council's correspondence file survives.
- That sentence bounds your conclusions, which makes the conclusions you did reach more credible rather than less.
- A submission that answered every question completely is either a very small question or an inquiry that stopped asking.
Assessing the process, usefully
- Go stage by stage — preparation, organisation, annotation, evaluation — and say what worked and what did not in each.
- Be specific about causes. Not I should have started earlier but I contacted the museum in week four, and the retrieval took nine days, so I annotated two sources in one evening rather than as I read them.
- Name what you would do differently, with a reason. I would search the council's records before the newspapers, because the newspaper material shaped my questions before I had an independent source to test it against.
- Two or three specific points beat a page of general reflection. The specificity is what shows you were watching your own method.
Worked Example
Worked example
Two evaluations of the same inquiry into the Mangaroa Bridge memorial (invented, written for this page).
Version A
Version B — rewrite it.
Answer:
Step 1 — diagnose A. Every sentence is about the student: how it went, what they found, what they would do, what they enjoyed. The word "inquiry" appears once and is not the subject of any judgement. Nothing in it could not be written about any inquiry into any topic, which is the definitive test for a reflection rather than an evaluation.
Step 2 — evaluate the evidence base as a set.
Step 3 — say who is missing, precisely.
Step 4 — say what could not be established, with the three parts.
Step 5 — assess the process by stage, with causes not resolutions.
Version B judges the evidence base as a set, names precisely whose voices it could not reach, states what it could not establish and what would have settled it, and identifies a search-order decision with its consequence — every sentence with the inquiry, not the student, as its subject.