All of my IA topics have been rejected ):

[Loopiez]

These are my topics which have been recommended as unsuitable by my teacher. Can anyone tell me why?

1) How significant was the advancement of weaponry in helping the Allies win the war in Europe during WW2

2) To what extent was the Nazi Party's foreign policy directly dictated by Hitler himself [i'm not too sure of the time span, but I'm quite sure its' from the early 1930s to before WW2]

3) To what extent did the consequences of Hitler's dictatorship affect the role and position of women in Nazi Germany?

4) This last topic I cannot phrase properly, but it is the topic I am the most interested in. It is about German and German Youth resistance toward the Nazis during World War 2.

[Arrowhead]

1) There really isn't much to talk about in this topic. How is a war fought? With weaponry! Genius! The nitty gritty of it is that weaponry is one of the most significant aspects of any war.

2) This is such a random topic, Hitler was their Führer and he directed them much after he replaced Hindenburg as well, maybe not directly, but that's just a minor technicality, the key word being minor.

3) This is the most generic, useless topic you could pick up. Beyond the fact that it is overdone to death in one form or another, the second point is that it is too vast. The RQ as it is worded can be panned into a dissertation paper.

4) Again, really random and hardly something original.

The reason your teacher keeps rejecting your topics is because they're topics that have been selected based off of the matter and content you have been studying in class. The point of the IA is to try and pick a research question on an aspect of History you do not study in class. I picked an IA topic pertaining to Gandhi and the violence in the Indian freedom movement, I did not study a lick of Indian history at my Swiss IB school, but I chose to do that because it was different from my syllabus. For your IA, try to steer clear o the World Wars and find a topic or idea that is often overlooked but would make for a different and interesting paper.

[EccentricPianist]

The way I came up with mine was actually by accident. I had this book I picked up out of curiosity on the progressive era, and had a question about one of the subsections in that book. In my opinion, the less you're familiar with the subject, the more room you have to grow, and you won't have preconceived notions already in place. (Of course, you may want to be just a teensy bit familiar with the topic. Something completely off the wall might be hard to research.

Just my opinions.

Happy Writing!

~Eccentric Pianist

Edit: Try to stay away from those topics that you feel that everybody might do e.g. lots of World War 1&2 and the Holocaust. There are plenty of things that have happened other than those two!

P.S. My teacher made us come up with a question, and then write it in five different ways, each way emphasized a different aspect of the question. That might help if you feel stuck. You may just find a new angle!

Edited October 13, 2011 by EccentricPianist

[i love ib lol jk]

Not gonna lie, they are all pretty terrible. However, the first one does have some potential though if you'd like to talk about World War I. Something like "how did the advancement of technology in the First World War affect the development of warfare", there you can talk about trench warfare with machine guns, artillery and also about submarines and things like that.

Remember you have only 2k words to play around with and in reality only about 1200 words of writing about the topic. Be very careful when choosing a topic because it needs to be something specific. It is also a good idea to pick a title that overlaps with your syllabus as if you're gonna spend that much time you might as well be revising at the same time.

If you're interested in Nazism, then I think investigating the experimentation of Nazi doctors would be an interesting one (obviously it has be a lot more specific)

Good luck

[Loopiez]

Okay, thanks for the input. I think the reason that they've also all been rejected is also because apparently an IA is supposed to be a debate with two opposing sides to an argument. Is that true? As in, it's not just a research paper on a particular topic but it has to be about an issue which has had considerable debate, isn't it?

And I was gonna do my IA on a topic unrelated to the syllabus, but all of my seniors doing History have warned me not to. I'm not so sure why, but I can see it being in my favour to do an IA on a topic which I'm somewhat familiar with already.

[URA BOAT]

also dont pick a topic that has been abused with research and papers on it...like why caused the WWl or WWll...and yes the debate will help you explore both of the sides and conclude your final answer/opinion