The internal assessment asks you to design a research proposal for a population of interest, using one of the four research methods you met in your class practicals.
You do not carry it out. There are no participants, no data, no results, no statistics and no graphs.
That surprises people, so it is worth saying twice. Nobody fills in your questionnaire. You design the study, you explain every decision you made, and that is the entire task.
The sentence the whole task turns on
The IB's own guidance is unusually direct about what is being marked.
The focus of the assessment of the IA is on students' ability to justify their methodological decision-making, not on their ability to design the perfect study.
That is from the Teacher Support Material, not from a tutor, and it changes where your time should go.
You do not need a brilliant idea. You do not need to be a research genius. A simple study with strong reasons beats a clever study with none.
Every year, ambitious designs land in the middle band because the reasons behind them were never written down.
What it is worth
| Internal assessment | External exams | |
|---|---|---|
| SL | 30% | 70% |
| HL | 20% | 80% |
Recommended teaching time is about twenty hours.
That weighting is worth pausing on, especially at SL. Compare it to Paper 1, where you get ninety minutes and whatever is in your head that morning. Here you have weeks. You have your notes, the internet, your teacher, and the published mark scheme. The IB has told you exactly what earns marks.
And marks still get lost, not because the task is hard but because a proposal can look completely finished from the inside while missing the specific sentences the criteria ask for.
The four sections
Use these headings exactly. It makes it obvious to the examiner where each criterion is being met, and you want it obvious.
| Section | Marks | Suggested words | What it has to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 6 | 400 to 450 | Set out a real problem, say who it harms, summarise two studies, state your aim or research question |
| Research Methodology | 6 | 450 to 500 | Say which method and why, justify every step of the procedure, handle ethics |
| Data Collection | 6 | 450 to 500 | Present your tool, justify every choice inside it, name what could go wrong |
| Discussion | 6 | 600 to 660 | Describe what you might find, what should change, your own bias, one more method |
The 2,200-word limit and the marks per criterion are IB requirements. The word targets per section are recommendations, and they are there to stop the discussion getting squeezed.
Choosing your method
One of four: experiment (true or quasi), interviews, observations, or a survey and questionnaire.
Mixed-methods studies are not appropriate for the IA. Pick one and defend it.
The twelve bullets you are actually marked on
Each criterion has three bullets. Twelve in total, and every one of them is a sentence you either wrote or did not.
Introduction. Your aim or research question is clear and focused. The real-life problem is described and its impact on your population explained. The findings and conclusions of two relevant studies are explained and linked to your investigation.
Research Methodology. Why you chose your method is explained. Your procedure is explained, with reasons. The ethical considerations that matter are described and tied explicitly to your own investigation.
Data Collection. You have created a tool that fits your aim and would actually work. The decisions behind the tool are explained and relevant to your aim. The challenges of collecting data are explained and relevant to your investigation.
Discussion. Potential findings are described in detail and their implications for policy or practice explained. How researcher bias could affect your investigation is discussed. The usefulness of one additional method is discussed, including how it would increase understanding.
Print that list. Read your draft against it line by line. Most lost marks are a bullet nobody wrote a sentence for.
How best fit marking works
Each criterion is marked holistically across its three bullets, not averaged.
Read all three, then ask which band description most fairly reflects the balance of what is there. Two bullets at 5 to 6 and one at 1 to 2 is usually a 4. Two at 3 to 4 and one at 5 to 6 is usually a 4.
Be honest rather than generous with yourself, because your examiner will be neither.
The word count
The report must not exceed 2,200 words. That figure already includes the ten per cent leeway around the official 2,000.
There is no penalty for going over, which sounds harmless and is not. Examiners are instructed to stop reading at the limit. You simply lose everything after the cutoff, and what sits at the end of your proposal is the discussion, which is a quarter of the marks.
| Counted | Not counted |
|---|---|
| Everything in your four sections | Title page, references, appendices, in-text citations, headings, data in tables |
If you are over, some things are safe to cut and some are not. Safe: procedural detail in your study summaries, any third study, restating your aim, hedging. Never cut any sentence containing "because", the effectiveness claim in your data collection section, or the deeper-understanding sentence in your discussion. Under pressure people cut the wrong things and lose marks they had already earned.
Presentation
Your title page needs the title of the investigation, your IB student code, the date of submission, and the word count.
Headings: Introduction, Research Methodology, Data Collection, Discussion, Works Cited.
References in APA or another standard format, with in-text citations throughout. No footnotes, which are not current practice in psychology. References are not assessed, but they are required for academic integrity.
Your appendix needs a full copy of your own data collection tool, which must contain a minimum of five items. Any published measure you drew on goes in the reference list with a note on what you took from it.
None of this earns marks directly. All of it gets flagged if it is missing.
How to approach the writing
The four-section table above tells you what the IA contains. The more useful next question is how to turn those criteria into an actual document without letting one section consume the word count.
That is a separate job, so the IB Psychology IA structure guide takes it paragraph by paragraph, including a suggested word budget, what each paragraph needs to do, and a writing order that protects the discussion.
For this overview, the principle to keep is simple: do not treat the IA as four equal chunks of prose just because the four criteria are worth the same number of marks. Plan the whole proposal before you start drafting, and protect enough space for the discussion.
Where to go next
- How to find a workable research proposal
- How to choose a research question
- How to structure the new IA
- How to justify your method, sample and procedure
One last thing worth saying plainly. Model proposals, including mine, exist to show you what the criteria look like when they are met. They are not to be copied into work you submit as your own. Use them to understand, then write your own.
If you want the criteria worked through bullet by bullet with sentence banks, band descriptors and a complete model proposal, that is what the PsychExcel Complete IA Handbook is built for.