nana extended investigation (ei) is so much fun. i did it through vsv so i didnt have the best of experience, but because the subject is so independent, there isn’t always that teacher guidance required.
the first thing you are going to do is make a subscription to the state library of victoria (free access membership) to access the database of research articles. also use google scholar because the state library is very limited. if you encounter an article you need to pay for, enter the doi number here. you will need to analyse the articles, and i can send through a template/structure if you would like.
but before you look for articles in the literature, you’re going to need a topic. the topic needs to be a topic where there is a gap in the current literature. for example, my topic investigated the influences on participation rates of physical activity within late adolescent females in metropolitan melbourne. there was quite a bit of literature out there exploring facilitating and restricting factors to physical activity, but none in the geographic context of metropolitan melbourne… the gap in the literature! furthermore, the factors were not considered holistically rather in an atomistic manner… another gap! as you read and synthesise through the articles, you will realise that each study has their flaws, and that the field you are interested in studying will definitely have a gap, or multiple gaps.
my second piece of advice is to keep your study simple yet interesting. interesting research is important as you will be working on this for like 11 months (i started november 2023 and finished october 2024). if you don’t have an interest in your topic, it will become super boring. you don’t need to have an extravagant project that explores quantum field theory because you will have 3 weeks dedicated to personal data collection AT MOST, and how the hell will you explore something so complex and explain that in a 4000 word report? not going to happen. your topic will need to be simple but not too simple where you can explain it to a 4 year old in a sandpit. some topics in my class were perfectionism and school refusal— which aren’t overly complicated yet not super simple. it is also important you keep it simple and not have too many factors to investigate, which is where i stumbled in my own study. my study investigated three factors using a model with three other factors to investigate two different effects. it made data analysis very confusing and difficult to explain in my writing.
which leads me to my third piece of advice… DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING. if you are writing up a sac or your final report and don’t like something, don’t even think about deleting it. you might reuse it another time or reword it. you must have a journal where you log all the articles you read and any writing or class tasks, because if vcaa doesn’t think it’s your work, you have proof (also the journal is a vcaa requirement). also, not really advice but more common sense is to not use chat gpt for writing. it can be useful in providing a summary of the articles, which is good because they’re long and tedious and you don’t want to be wasting time. but don’t use it to do your analysis because the subject focuses on critical analysis, which lets be honest… ai sucks at.
don’t have a planned methodology in mind right now, because you might want to do a survey now but maybe that isn’t the best for you in the long run.
also, the oral presentation is really chill, the examiners are quite nice and they only look for ways to reward you. if you have any questions i’ll try replying as fast as i can because exams are literally next week (eek)
