Preparation and focusing questions
What the standard means by preparation
- The 2024 text names three things: identifying a topic, preliminary reading, and developing focusing questions.
- Preliminary reading is not optional and it is not research. It is the reading you do before you know what you are asking, and its purpose is to make the questions possible.
- The order matters and students usually reverse it. Reading first, questions second. A question written before any reading is a guess about what the evidence contains.
- Show all three in your submission. What you read first, what it told you, and the questions that came out of it.
Preliminary reading, done properly in three hours
- Read two or three general accounts — an encyclopaedia entry, a local history chapter, a museum or archive summary.
- You are reading for four things, and none of them is facts about the topic:
- What the main events and dates are, so you can place anything you find later.
- What the arguments are — what people disagreed about at the time, and what historians disagree about now.
- What kinds of sources exist, and where they are held.
- What is missing — questions the general accounts raise and do not answer.
- The fourth is where your focusing questions come from. A gap in the general accounts is a question worth asking, and it is the only reliable way to find one.
- Write down what you read and when. Preliminary reading is part of the assessed process, and a submission that shows only the final sources has hidden a whole stage.
What makes a focusing question good
- It is answerable from sources you can actually get. The most common failure is a question that would need records that do not exist or are not accessible.
- It is narrow enough to answer and wide enough to need evidence. When was the memorial unveiled? is a fact, not a question. Why did it take nine years? is a question.
- It starts with why, how, or to what extent — not what or when, which are answered by looking something up.
- It does not assume its own answer. Why was the council so opposed? assumes the council was opposed. What positions did the council take? does not.
- Three or four questions is the right number. One is too few to structure an inquiry; six spreads your evidence too thin to annotate properly.
Building a question set that works together
- Use a spine and branches. One main question, with two or three sub-questions that each need different evidence.
- Make the sub-questions need different sources. If all three are answered by the same newspaper, they are one question. Different sources means the annotation and cross-referencing stages have material to work with.
- Include at least one question about people — who was involved, who was affected, who objected. People-questions lead to perspectives, which the annotation stage explicitly asks about.
- Include one question you are not sure you can answer. If it fails, saying so in your evaluation is worth more than a fourth safe question.
Revising your questions, and why it earns credit
- A question that changes because of what you found is evidence of a real inquiry. It is one of the strongest things a submission can contain.
- Show the revision, not just the final version. The original question, what you found, and why it made you change.
- Three legitimate reasons to revise: the evidence does not exist; the question turned out to be answerable in a line; the evidence pointed at a better question next to it.
- Keep a dated log. Week 2: changed Q2 because the minute book showed the decision was unanimous, so 'why was it contested' had no subject. One line, and it demonstrates preparation and annotation working together.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student is inquiring into the Mangaroa Bridge memorial — an invented local memorial written for this page — and has drafted four questions.
- Q1: When was the memorial built?
- Q2: Why were the people so upset about the accident?
- Q3: Why did it take nine years between the accident and the unveiling?
- Q4: What did the district's newspapers say about the memorial fund?
Assess and improve the set.
Answer:
Step 1 — Q1 fails the "not a lookup" test. A date is found once and is then finished. It is not useless — it belongs in the background section — but it cannot structure an inquiry. Demote it from a focusing question to a fact to establish.
Step 2 — Q2 assumes its own answer. It takes for granted that people were upset, and how upset, and treats that as the thing to explain. Rewrite it so the evidence can answer either way: How did people in the district respond to the accident, and did responses differ between groups? The revised version can be answered with a "less than expected", which the original cannot.
Step 3 — Q3 is the strongest of the four and should be the spine. It asks why, it cannot be answered by a lookup, and a nine-year gap is a real puzzle that demands several kinds of evidence: fundraising records, council minutes, newspaper reports, and possibly a war or an economic depression intervening.
Step 4 — Q4 is well aimed but too narrow as written. What did the newspapers say is a single-source question. Widen it to a comparison: How did public argument about the memorial fund change between the accident and the unveiling? — which now needs newspapers at two dates, and invites annotation about change over time.
Step 5 — check the set needs different sources.
- Q3 (spine) needs council minutes, fund records and newspapers.
- Revised Q2 needs newspapers, any surviving correspondence, and — the strongest option if the event is recent enough — oral history.
- Revised Q4 needs newspapers at two dates, and the memorial's own inscription.
Three questions, four kinds of source, and one of them about people. That set will generate annotations worth writing.
Step 6 — add the question that might fail. Whose names were left off the memorial, and why? If the answer is nobody, that is a finding. If the records do not survive, saying so in the evaluation is worth more than a fourth safe question.