The proposal and the focusing questions
What the standard asks for at the start
- Step one is a research proposal that explains the importance of the topic.
- Note the wording: not describing the topic, but explaining its importance.
- Importance is measured against the standard's five significance criteria: importance to people at the time, depth of impact, number of lives affected, duration, and the extent to which the event or place continues to affect people.
- A proposal that says what happened has not said why it matters, and the standard's word is explains.
- Step two is developing focusing questions that RESULT FROM preliminary research.
- The order is specified. Read first, then write the questions.
- Questions written before any reading are guesses, and they usually turn out to be unanswerable from the sources that exist — which costs weeks.
What makes a good focusing question
- It must be answerable from evidence you can actually get. This is why preliminary reading comes first.
- It must be a question, not a topic. The Riversdale scheme is a topic. Why did the scheme proceed despite objections? is a question.
- It must be narrow enough to answer and open enough to require evidence.
- Too broad: What was the impact of the scheme? — every source is relevant, so nothing is selectable.
- Too narrow: What year did the scheme begin? — one source answers it and there is nothing to annotate.
- Right: Whose objections were recorded, and on what grounds were they set aside?
- Two or three questions is the usual number. They should divide the topic, not overlap.
- The best sets contain one question that can be answered from primary sources and one that needs secondary sources, because the title requires both.
Choosing an event or a place
- The standard permits both, and defines each.
- An historical event is one of three things:
- a specific historical event
- an historical development or movement
- a person's role in and contribution to a significant event or movement
- An historical place is one of three things:
- a place where something significant happened
- a place where something significant is commemorated — a war memorial, a tomb
- a place where something significant is contained — a cemetery, a museum, a marae
- Places are often the better choice for this standard, and the reason is practical: a place has a physical presence that generates primary evidence — plaques, records of its establishment, photographs, and people who remember it.
- Biography alone is insufficient. The standard says the focus must be the person's role in or contribution to an event, not their life.
Significance to New Zealanders
- Three permitted relationships, and the standard states them for this standard as for the others:
- an historical event occurring within New Zealand
- an international event involving New Zealanders
- an international event influencing New Zealanders
- The standard says explicitly: "to be of significance to New Zealanders, an event does not have to be located in New Zealand."
Worked Example
Worked example
Note: the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is an INVENTED case, used here so the method can be shown without making claims about a real place.
A student wants to research the scheme — a fictional 1950s public works project that drained wetland for farmland, displaced a small settlement, and is now marked by a memorial stone. They draft four focusing questions. Which should they keep?
- 1: What was the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme?
- 2: What was the impact of the scheme?
- 3: Whose objections to the scheme were recorded between 1954 and 1961, and on what grounds were they set aside?
- 4: Why was the memorial stone erected in 1994, and what does its wording emphasise?
Answer:
Step 1 — test each against the "question, not topic" rule.
1 fails. What was X? is a request for a description. It has no answer that requires selecting between sources, so there is nothing to annotate — and annotation is where Merit lives.
Step 2 — test the survivors for selectability.
2 fails, and it fails in the opposite direction. What was the impact? makes every source relevant. When everything is relevant, nothing can be selected — and the standard's step four requires selecting sufficient relevant evidence, which presupposes that some evidence is not relevant.
Step 3 — test 3 and 4 for whether the evidence exists.
3 requires records of a decision-making process — minutes, correspondence, submissions, newspaper reports. These are primary sources, and the standard's own list includes government papers and newspaper clippings. The question also builds in a perspective element, since "whose objections" invites cross-referencing between accounts.
4 requires the memorial itself, records of its erection, and whatever was written at the time. It also invites secondary sources, because the question of why a commemoration happened forty years later is one historians write about.
Step 4 — check the pair against the title's requirement.
The title says using primary and secondary sources.
- 3 is answerable mainly from primary sources.
- 4 requires secondary sources to explain the commemoration in context.
- Together they force both kinds, which is exactly what the standard requires. A pair of questions that both need the same kind of source leaves half the title unmet.
Step 5 — check they divide rather than overlap.
3 is about 1954–1961. 4 is about 1994. They cover the event and its commemoration — two distinct bodies of evidence, which means evidence found for one is not double-counted for the other.
Step 6 — note what to record now.
Write down that 1 and 2 were the first drafts and why they were replaced. The Achieved-level evaluation asks how the line of inquiry changed as evidence accumulated. This is that evidence, and it exists only if it is written down at the time.