PPE review - Fieldwork

Which types of enquiry questions below would be best when conducting coastal fieldwork?

• To what extent has coastal management affected the beach profiles in sites A and B?

• Why are tourists attracted to a beach?

• How do differences in geology affect the beach profiles between sites A and B?

• Why do people live near the coast?

Answer explanation

When suggesting fieldwork questions, they need to be detailed and located to specific places.

Which two from the below would be accurate examples of problems that a student's choice of location may create on a coastline?

• Access to different coastal locations might be difficult, so that creates health and safety issues.

• Some beaches might have beach nourishment, which could make the results unreliable because of human intervention.

• Too many people live in one location, so that means it is overcrowded.

• The beaches might be too close together.

Answer explanation

When asked to suggest problems, you need to not only identify the problem but say why it is a problem.

How can using an OS map help students to choose their beach locations for fieldwork?

• It shows you where the houses and businesses are.

• You can establish whether the beach is accessible or not, which helps manage health and safety and timings.

• Sites can be chosen to reflect different aspects, such as characteristics of the beaches/cliffs or management differences between beaches.

• It can show you were there are information points and museums.

Answer explanation

An OS map can also be used to measure distances between sites all maps have a scale.

What affected the accuracy of our fielwork results?

• The weather on the day was poor, which means that on another day it might have been better so our results won't be the same as other people's results.

• There could have been issues with pupils using the clinometers to take their readings, which is a form of human error.

• Some groups did not use systematic sampling, but instead used random sampling for the sediment size tests.

• Some students in our group did not take care when measuring timings in the longshore drift tests, which may have provided us with inaccurate results.

What affected the reliability of our fielwork results?

• The weather on the day was poor, which means that on another day it might have been better so our results won't be the same as other people's results.

• There could have been issues with pupils using the clinometers to take their readings, which is a form of human error.

• Some groups did not use systematic sampling, but instead used random sampling for the sediment size tests.

• Some students in our group did not take care when measuring timings in the longshore drift tests, which may have provided us with inaccurate results.

How could we have improved our accuracy?

• Ensured we took multiple measurements of the same tests and created means.

• Compared data with the second group's data to check for replicability.

• Practice using the equipment before we visited our sites to ensure all pupils knew how to use the equipment.

• Checked the weather before our visit and only planned to go when it was a sunny day.

Answer explanation

You will need to assess your reliability and accuracy of either your results or conclusion or methods. They are fairly the same - just remember accuracy is refering to how close the measured value is to the true value of a population.

Reliability is how repeatable and consistent the measurements of an investigation are.

How could we have checked our reliability?

• Using secondary research, such as the iGeology app or using Shoreline Management plans.

• By conducting the methods across several days to ensure the results were replicable.

• By checking the equipment beforehand.

• By practicing our fieldwork techniques before we went and conducted the fieldwork.

Which questions do I answer on Paper 2 in the fieldwork section?

• Question 8

• Question 9

• Question 10

• Question 11

Answer explanation

We did coasts and urban. Don't answer the rivers or the rural questions - we didn't do those things.

Where did we conduct our fieldwork?

• Margate Sands and Westbrook Bay

• Sittingbourne High Street

• Margate High Street and Westbrook Gardens

• Reculver Beach

What did we do to look at environmental quality in Margate from a quantitative point of view?

• EQS - Environmental Quality Survey which judged varying characteristics of the environment.

• Decibel test, which measured the amount of noise pollution

• Questionnaires

• Quality of life survey