Lesson video

Hello, geographers, it's Mr. Robertson here and I'm delighted to be learning with you again.

We are continuing with our big enquiry question, Local area: what needs changing? I can't wait to get started.

So, have you got on your geography caps? Are you ready to put on your explorer rucksacks? Let's find out what we are learning about today.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to identify and adapt appropriate techniques to support a fieldwork enquiry.

And as usual, we have some keywords.

I'm going to say the keyword first and then you are going to say it back to me.

So our first keyword is questionnaire.

Super.

Our second key word is interview.

Brilliant.

Our next word is enquiry.

Amazing.

And finally, techniques.

Wow.

We are really using some brilliant vocabulary today.

So let's just find out what all those words mean, shall we? A questionnaire is a set of questions used to collect information or data.

An interview means talking to people to gather information.

An enquiry is an investigation of a geographical question or issue.

And techniques are particular ways of doing things.

We will use these keywords throughout this lesson, and by the end, I'm sure you're gonna have a really great understanding of what they all mean.

So this lesson builds on our first lesson.

In our first lesson we talked about the fact we were setting up a big geographical enquiry and that enquiry was going to be looking at what needs changing in your local area.

In the last lesson, we looked at some historical maps and current maps and started to gather evidence and ideas about what local issues might be.

For the first part of this lesson, we're going to think a little more about evidence we might need to identify a local issue.

In the second part of the lesson, we're going to be thinking what do people think needs changing in our local area? And you are going to be doing some fieldwork to investigate this.

And in the final part of the lesson, we're going to be thinking about fieldwork techniques.

So a really practical lesson for us today to begin to really dig deeply into this geographical enquiry.

I'm really excited.

Are you ready to go? Let's go.

During this lesson, we will be carrying out a fieldwork enquiry, and to make it more understandable, I've broken this fieldwork enquiry down into six stages, and we're going to be going through these stages today as part of the lesson: the first stage of an enquiry is to ask questions.

The second part of a fieldwork enquiry is to plan our data collection.

What information is it that we want to gather? The third part is to collect and present our data.

So to actually go out there, gather the data, gather the information, and then decide how we're going to present it.

Once we've gathered and presented the data, we will reflect on our findings.

What have we learned? What does it tell us? Once we've reflected on it and we've done some learning, we'll communicate it, we'll let people know what we found out.

And finally, we will evaluate the fieldwork.

We'll look back at everything we've done and think, "Right.

What worked well there? If I was doing this again, what might I change?" The first stage of our enquiry is to ask questions so that we can identify a local issue to investigate.

We are going to focus on how to ask questions and what to ask questions about now.

In our last lesson, we thought about how we might find out some issues that were important to our local area.

I looked at my local area of Whitley Bay and I had looked at some OS maps and the media and my own knowledge of the local area.

All of those are really important when we are thinking about what issues we want to investigate.

After doing some research, the issues that I chose to investigate were the following: Traffic near our school.

In my area of Whitley Bay, there are roads near the schools and people have been concerned about the amount of traffic on the roads and whether that's safe or not.

Litter.

Using stories in the local media, I could see that there were issues about increasing litter and so that might be something to investigate as well.

And finally, reducing the carbon footprint of our school.

Whitley Bay has a lot of residential areas and we know that carbon is a really big issue in terms of climate change.

And so one of the issues we wanted to think about was how we could help our school reduce its carbon footprint.

Can you remember which issues that you thought were important to investigate in your local area? How do we make a decision which of those we should investigate? In order for us to decide which issue to investigate, it's going to be really important that we talk to some local people because what they say will help us to decide what issue we should focus on.

Now, to do this, we need to actually talk to some local people and to help us with that, we can use some interview and questionnaire techniques.

This boy is saying, "Please may I ask some questions about your local area?" "Sure, no problem." So an interview is a way in which we might gather information by talking to people, asking questions, and gathering the information they give us.

But we need to make sure that our questions are clear and easy to understand so that we get the data that we need.

We could ask, "which issues do you think is the most important to change in our local area?" Let's think about that question.

Will this question get answers that are easy to analyse? I'd like you to pause the video now and talk about that with your talk partner.

If we ask the question to people, "Which issue do you think is the most important to change in our local area?", will that question get answers that we can analyse easily? Pause the video and have a think.

Let's think about how different people might answer that question.

So we're going to stop somebody and say, "Which issue do you think is the most important to change in our local area?" What kind of answers might they say? One person might say, "I think the most important issue is litter." Someone else might say, "I think protecting local wildlife is most important." Another person might say, "We need to change the amount of litter." And one other person might say, "I think the amount of cars outside of school is the most important." So we've got lots of different responses to that question.

Do they all have the same opinion? Do they all think the issues are the most important? Pause the video and talk about that with the person next to you.

The difficulty here is that they've given lots of different answers, haven't they? Someone is talking about litter, someone else is talking about protecting wildlife.

Someone else is talking about cars.

And because we've got lots of different opinions, it's going to be quite difficult to analyse.

So if we give people options to choose from, it makes data collection much easier.

So we ask the same question, which of the following issues do you think is the most important to change in our local area? But we give people clear options.

Option A: traffic near our school, option B: litter, option C: protecting local wildlife.

And then instead of giving lots of different opinions, which are really difficult to analyse, people can choose a letter and then we can see what they think.

If we look at the different responses there, we can see that two people said B, which means that half the people we asked thought that litter was important whilst one person thought it was about protecting local wildlife and another traffic.

This data is much easier to analyse and collect.

So let's check what we've learned so far.

Listen to this statement.

Good questionnaires include these features: A: questions that are clear and easy to understand.

B: long questions, C: questions with a selection of responses to choose from.

Hmm, which of those statements make sense? I'd like you to pause the video, talk to the person next to you and see what you come up with.

Great thinking, geographers.

Yes, A, the questions that need to be clear and easy to understand so that the person who's being asked them knows what you want to find out.

And C: questions with a selection of responses to choose from.

So that way you can collect the data and analyse it.

Long questions are complex and the person might not understand them and it will be very hard for you to analyse them.

So you are going to have a go at doing this for yourself now.

I want you to design a questionnaire to find out which issue is the most important to you and your school community.

Make sure you give people a selection of responses to choose from, just as we've been talking about.

And it can be labelled A, B, C or A, B, C or D.

You can decide how many people you want to interview, but try to ask as many different people as possible.

Don't just ask people your age or in your class because that won't give a great range of opinions.

You'll just have the opinions of a lot of eight-year-old children.

Try to aim to ask at least five to ten people so that you've got some answers that you can analyse, and that way you get a range of opinions.

Okay, geographers, off you go.

So what kind of questionnaire did you come up with? Here's an example of a questionnaire which I've written to find out what's important to my school community.

My question is this: Which issue do you think is the most important change in our local area? And I'm giving three options: A: traffic near our school, B: litter, C: protecting local wildlife around our school.

Did you remember to ask as many different people as possible? I'm really excited by the fieldwork that you are doing, and I'm really looking forward to analysing and finding out what people said.

Second part of our lesson is what do people think need changing in our local area? So now we've got the answers to our questions, we need to look at the data to find out which issue local people thought was most important.

Hopefully you have got your questionnaire results.

So you've done your first bit of fieldwork, geographers.

Now we need to decide how we're going to present the data.

We could use a table, as we can see on the left, to present the data.

We could also use a graph.

These are really helpful because they enable us to see clearly what the answers were.

In the fieldwork that we did, our class interviewed 70 people in total.

How many people did you manage to interview in your enquiry? I've presented the results of my questionnaire on a table.

Look clearly at the table.

You can see in green we've got the issue.

And the three issues were A: traffic near our school, B: litter, and C: reducing the carbon footprint of our school.

And then in the next row of the table, I've got the different number of people that gave those responses.

Let's check if we can analyse this.

Which issue was identified by people as the most important to change in our local area? Was it A, B, or C? Pause the video, talk to the person next to you.

Look at the information in that table.

Congratulations.

It was B, wasn't it? Litter was chosen by most people.

37 people out of 70 thought that litter was the most important issue.

23 people thought it was traffic and 10 thought it was reducing the carbon footprint of the school.

I wonder what people thought was the most important issue in your local area.

So now you are going to create three enquiry questions to investigate based on the results of your questionnaire.

So your questionnaire will hopefully have told you which was the most important issue in your local area.

And now you know what you are going to investigate.

The next stage is to create an enquiry question to find out a little bit more about that issue so you can investigate it.

Remember, enquiry questions start with a question word.

So you might want to think of a word that starts with why, where, when, who, what, or how.

Can you put one of those words into a sentence to enable you to investigate your question in more detail? Off you go, geographers.

Create those questions.

And I'm really looking forward to finding out what questions you've decided to use.

Wow, what a lot of amazing enquiry questions I can see you've come up with.

I created three enquiry questions to investigate based on the results of my questionnaire.

So my first question is: Where is there a litter problem in our local area? Because I want to find out exactly where it is.

My second problem is why is there a litter problem in our local area? Because I want to investigate, well, why is there litter? Where is it coming from? And finally, I want to find out what can we do to improve the litter problem? Because I don't want it to stay as it is.

I want to think of ways to make it better.

I expect you've come up with some really interesting enquiry questions of your own.

Well done, geographers.

For the final part of this lesson, we're going to be learning a bit more about different fieldwork techniques.

So we've got our enquiry questions and just to recap, the enquiry questions that I've come up with is where is there a litter problem in our local area? Why is there a litter problem in our local area? And what can we do to help resolve the issue? You've come up with your own enquiry questions.

Now the big question is how are we going to answer them? So you might want to pause the video at this moment and think a little bit about this.

If you were investigating, how would you do it? Pause the video and have a think.

This is the second stage where we choose how we're going to investigate our questions.

So we're going to focus on planning our data collection in this part of the lesson.

So with regards to the question, where is there a litter problem in our local area? To do this, we need to find out where most litter is.

And one way we can do this is by locating it on a map.

So therefore we can identify really clearly where are the litter hotspots.

Thinking about the question, why is there a litter problem in our local area? This is about reasons and we need to think about why people are throwing their litter.

So it might be that one of the reasons we think people are throwing litter is because there isn't enough bins.

So one thing we could do to investigate that is mark the number of bins that exist at the moment on our map, and that will help us see if there are any patterns.

If we locate our data on a map, we can connect it and see if there are any patterns.

So you can see an example there of a map, and that is a map of my school in Whitley Bay.

So what fieldwork techniques could we use to collect our data? Remember we want to find out where a litter problem might be and why is it happening? What techniques could we use to collect our data? Pause the video and have a think.

Oh, some interesting thoughts.

Absolutely.

Yes, what a great idea.

We could do some observation, couldn't we? We could go and look around our local area and find out what we can see.

We could do some map annotation and every time we find some information out, we could annotate our map.

And finally we could take photographs of the evidence.

So we are building up all the evidence we need about the important issues in our local area.

Well done if you came up with some of those ideas.

So let's think about observation.

When we observe things, it means we are looking carefully around our local area.

So for example, we might be able to identify where are different bins situated in our local area.

We might also be able to identify where is there litter? Where can I see piles of litter? And then once we've got that information, we can annotate it on the map and label it.

What do we mean by map annotation? So map annotation is where, on our map, we carefully mark where things are and we do it in a way that the information is clear and easy to understand.

Look at the example here.

As part of my fieldwork, I've been out and I've marked the locations of any bins I found on the maps and I marked them with a blue circle so I can create a key.

And I know rather than writing the word bin over the map, which is messy and makes it quite hard to understand, a simple blue circle I know will mark the location of bins.

So I'm annotating my map by creating a key and marking the bins.

Finally, photographs make great evidence.

As we go out on our fieldwork, we're going to see a lot of information.

We won't necessarily remember it all.

Taking photographs is really helpful.

This will help us to remember where there was a lot of rubbish and what the area around the bins was like.

Was it overflowing because the bins were full or was it a part of a street in a corner where people had put rubbish because they thought other people couldn't see it? Photographs will help us remember it and be really useful later.

I wonder what photographs you could take of your local area.

So let's just check what we've understood so far.

Which fieldwork techniques will be appropriate for our enquiry.

I've just given you some examples of some different fieldwork techniques that you can do.

Can you remember what they were? Pause the video and have a think.

Oh, brilliant.

Did you come up with map annotation? Annotating a map, creating a key so we know where things are.

Did you come up with observation? Looking very carefully to notice where things were and spotting any patterns.

Did you think about questionnaires, asking local people what they think about their local area? Did you think about taking photographs so that we can find out things like where is their piles of litter, or bins that might be overflowing? All of these things are going to be really helpful for us.

So your final task is this: I want you to make a list of the data that you need to collect and the appropriate fieldwork techniques that you will use.

Keep going back to the original question that you are asking to answer that question, what data are you going to need to collect and what is the best fieldwork technique that we've examined that is gonna help you collect that data? Okay, geographers, let's put on our fieldwork explorer rucksacks and think about this.

I look forward to seeing what you found out.

So I've got some examples for you here.

I wanted to find out about the amount and location of the litter, and I also wanted to find out about the number and location of public bins because my big question is finding out about litter.

Because if you remember in the questionnaires, that's what local people thought was the most important issue in Whitley Bay.

So to find out about the amount and location of bins, I need to use some observation.

I'm going to do some map annotation so I can annotate the map to find out where the different bins are and also where piles of litter might be.

And I'm also going to take some photographs so I can remember where the areas were, where there was a lot of litter.

What data did you need to collect and what techniques are most appropriate for what you wanted to find out? I can see you've come up with some fantastic ideas and there's gonna be some great fieldwork going on here.

Well done.

So let's summarise what we've learned today.

We've been thinking about fieldwork tools and techniques.

We've learned that questionnaires are a tool that geographers use to gather facts and opinions about places.

We've also learned in an interview, one person asks another questions and they answer.

So it's important to choose questions carefully.

And finally, we've learned that geographers connect data to locations using maps.

I've really enjoyed learning with you today and I'm really excited about our next lesson where we are going to continue our fieldwork in our local area.

Thank you very much.