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To prepare for your hour long write-up the best thing to do is write an actual assignment. What you write on the day of the write-up will be based on this.

Before starting it is best to know how the marking works. Also in Modern Studies you will have to write on particular exam paper with specific headings. The following shows both the marking and the headings (SQA headings) you will be expected to write under.

Research Topic/Issue

Put your title here: i.e. your question or hypothesis.

Describe the purpose/aims of your research

This is where you should put in your three aims. There are no marks for this section but you must complete it.

Research Methods

10 marks – which is 50% of the overall marks – is available for your description and analysis of the research methods you have used.

In this section you must refer to the two sources that you have on your resource sheet. You must write about the following:

• Why did you choose these two methods?
• What were the advantages and disadvantages of both methods?
• If you were to do the research again what would you do differently?

Too often students don't write enough in this section because they think that what they have found out is more important than how they found it out.

Remember: You should remember that more marks are available for discussing how you did your research than what your research produced.

Do not make generic comments about your method of research - such as a search engine is useful because it produces lots of different results. Instead, you should make specific comments about your source such as:

The Electoral Reform Society website was helpful as they are a pressure group that has produced a lot of research on electoral systems which is available on their website in an easy to read format.

Research Findings

This section is worth six marks. In this section you are essentially answering your three aims. You need to make use of your sources to answer these aims.

Too often people write too much for this section. It is worth six marks which is only two marks per aim. A good detailed paragraph for each aim should be enough.

Research Conclusions

This section is worth four marks. First of all you should come to a conclusion about each of your aims. Don't use any information or statistics that you have already used as repeating yourself will not get any marks. You should state what your conclusion is and why you came to it.

You should then have an overall conclusion where you are dealing directly with your title. If it is a question you need to directly answer it. If it is an hypothesis you must judge whether it was proved correct or incorrect. An example of the type of conclusion you could use is:

I conclude that short prison sentences of less than a year are not effective. The figures I found on the Prison Reform Trust website show that 2/3rds of prisoners with a sentence of less than a year will reoffend within a year.