What AS91229 asks you to do
The four stages are the assessment, not a suggested method
- The current standard, published December 2024, names four stages by name. Preparation, organisation, annotation, evaluation.
- Each is defined in the Explanatory Notes, and each has to be visible in what you hand in. A stage you did but did not show is a stage you cannot be credited for.
- Two of the four produce writing that looks nothing like an essay — annotation and evaluation — and those are the two students most often leave out.
- Plan your submission around the four headings from the start. If your teacher's task sheet uses different words, map them onto these four and check nothing is missing.
What you are actually being assessed on
- You are assessed on the process, not on the history. A student with a modest topic and an excellent inquiry outscores one with a fascinating topic and no annotations.
- The standard says nothing about producing a finished account. It asks you to prepare, organise, annotate and evaluate.
- This is unusual and it takes getting used to. Every other History standard rewards a polished explanation. This one rewards showing your working.
- The practical version: your notes, properly done, are the assessment. Not a rough draft of the assessment.
Choosing an event or a place
- An event may be: a specific event with a beginning and an end; a development or movement over time; or a person's role in a significant event.
- A place may be: a site where a significant event occurred; a place of commemoration — a war memorial, a tomb, a cenotaph; or a place that holds historical significance — a cemetery, a museum, a marae, an archive.
- Places are underused and often the better choice. A local memorial or cemetery is close enough to visit, small enough to research properly in the time available, and connected to national events through the people named on it.
- The significance test is the standard's own five measures — importance at the time, depth of impact, number affected, duration, and ongoing effects. A local place usually passes through the event it commemorates, not on its own.
Sizing the inquiry so it can be finished
- The commonest planning error is a topic that would take a historian a year. Four credits is roughly 40 hours of work including class time.
- A good size is a topic where you can realistically find eight to twelve usable sources, at least some of them local or primary.
- Narrow by place, by date, or by people. Soldiers from one district, one building, one decade in one town. Narrow topics produce specific evidence, and specific evidence is what annotation has something to say about.
- Check availability before committing. Spend one hour finding out whether sources exist. An hour spent on that is the cheapest hour in the whole inquiry.
What a finished submission contains
- Your focusing questions, with any revisions to them and the reason for each revision.
- A source list with full details — author, title, date, publisher or archive, and where you found it.
- Your annotated evidence — the extracts or notes, each with your annotation attached.
- Your cross-referencing — where sources agreed, disagreed, or were silent.
- Your evaluation — what worked, what did not, what you could not establish, and what you would do differently.
- Your teacher decides the format — a folder, a document, a presentation, a template. The format is theirs; the four stages are the standard's.
Worked Example
Worked example
Four students propose topics. Which are the right size, and how would you fix the others?
- A: The First World War.
- B: The names on my town's war memorial.
- C: My great-grandmother's life.
- D: A local factory that closed in the 1980s.
Answer:
Step 1 — check scale against 40 hours.
A is impossible. No inquiry of that size can be carried out in the time, and the sources are so numerous that selecting from them becomes the whole task. Reject.
Step 2 — check the standard's categories.
B is a place of commemoration, explicitly named in the standard, and it is the strongest of the four. The memorial is local and visitable; the names on it connect to a national and international event; the number of names bounds the inquiry naturally.
C is a biography, and the standard warns that biography alone is insufficient. Fix it: my great-grandmother's role in [a specific event or movement] — the person becomes the way in, and the event is the subject.
D is a site of a significant event, and works — provided the closure passes the significance test. Check it: how many people lost work, how deeply the town was affected, how long the effects lasted, and whether anything is still traceable. A closure that put 300 people out of work in a town of 4,000 passes comfortably.
Step 3 — check source availability, one hour, before committing.
For B: the memorial itself, the local museum or library, the district's newspaper archive, official rolls, and any published local history. Five kinds of source before starting is a good sign.
For D: the local newspaper, the company's records if they survive, council minutes, and — the strongest available and most underused — people who worked there, if the closure is recent enough for oral history.
Step 4 — narrow B further, because it is still slightly large. The names on my town's war memorial could become the fourteen men from one street, or the names added after 1945 and why the memorial was extended. A narrower question produces specific evidence, and specific evidence is what an annotation can say something about.