For most students, history can be a hit or a miss. It seems like you either love it more than anything and have resolved to do it at Senior Cycle or you really dislike it. Either way, you’ll want to do well and you can. Yes, there is a bit of 'learning off' needed for history (as there is for all subjects) but you can find easy ways to get better at this. History is not about knowing lots of dates, it’s essentially a series of stories about people's lives that you are asked to retell, analyse and examine.

Remember, the examiners want to give you marks and you can make this easy for them. This guide gives some general tips from an experienced examiner on where some of the common mistakes can happen and how they can be prevented. Whatever grade you’re hoping for, this guide can help get you on track.

For Junior Cycle History, there are two Classroom-Based Assessments (CBAs):

In a nutshell, you are asked to find out about someone or something in history that you will not be taught in class. These CBAs will involve you doing some of your own research on an event/person/place, etc. and creating a report on it. It’s like being a detective; we want you to go off and find clues/evidence on your own and tell us what you found out. Just remember that examiners want to see something original, not something simply copied from Wikipedia.

Common questions

What does this CBA involve?

CBA 1 asks you to research something in 'your place'. This could be your town, county, country of origin, where you’ve spent loads of summers, etc. You could also focus on your personal/family history. Basically, something from your world, life or locality. You might live near a castle, or the site of a battle, a monument, etc. The possibilities are endless.

How do I conduct research?

Once you’ve picked your topic, you need to start your research. You could start by asking family members or neighbours if they know anything (this would be a fantastic oral source). You could head down to your library and see what books/documents they have or you could head to the site and take some photos/videos. There’s always the internet but you need to be careful not to over-rely on our friend Google.

In order to focus your research, you could create a list of questions you are going to try to answer about your topic. You want your CBA to be quite narrow and focused and not just a huge jumble of information thrown at the reader. Like a detective, you are aiming to find out something specific and a list of questions could help here. For example, there might be a castle or the remains of a castle in your county so you might ask yourself:

How do I keep a record of my sources?

It's important to keep a good account of your research and your sources because there will be a reflective element to your CBA (how you got on doing this project and how you’ve improved as a historian). You could keep a journal of sorts about what you enjoyed and what you found difficult, etc.

How do I present it?

The term ‘report’ or ‘display’ will be thrown at you a lot but you can choose any format you like to present your CBA. Whatever you choose, it needs to be well-labelled and have plenty of detail, both on your topic and on your research and don't forget your piece of reflection. Your report could take the form of a:

This CBA follows the same format and layout as CBA 1 except for the following differences:

Once you’ve picked your person, you will research him/her in the same way as above and then create a report based on your findings (it’s that simple!).

This is the final, written exam which is assessed at common level and lasts for two hours. History comes somewhere in the middle of all your exams and is compulsory in most Irish schools. The new Junior Cycle History exam does not have a prescribed layout and as it is fairly new, we are not sure of what trends may emerge. We do know you will likely be asked questions based on pictures and documents with some essay/paragraph-style questions.

You will have practiced lots of picture questions over the past 3 years so these can be a great place to pick up marks. The 2021 sample paper created by the department gave us an idea of what these would look like.

These questions are where you have to pull information from your head on the day but remember, if you have taken some time to learn your 3 C’s (the causes, course and consequences) of the Famine, these will help hugely with these questions.

Similar to the picture questions, try to give as much detail as you can for the document questions. Again, you will likely be very familiar with this type of question and should do very well here. You will usually be asked some basic comprehension questions about what’s in the document and then you might be asked to 'dig a little deeper' and give some examples of bias, opinions, facts, prejudice and/or what makes this an example of propaganda, etc.

There tend to be more marks for these 'outside knowledge' (the stuff you’ve learned off) questions so you mustn’t over-rely on the questions relating specifically to the document or picture. Your 'outside knowledge is what’s key.

As mentioned earlier, these tend to be tacked on as the last part of each section (but this may change after the course is examined a few times). You will be given oceans of space so don’t think you have to fill every line but it is important to give as much detail as you can.

The 3 C's

In general, a good rule of thumb is to think 'beginning, middle and end' like you do with English essays. In history, this is referred to as 'causes, course, consequences' so make sure when learning off a certain topic that you can talk about why it started (causes), the main events during it (course) and the main results/effects of it (consequences). You may not always need all 3 but that’s how I would advise you to study each topic. A good example of this from the sample paper is when you were asked to name a specific event from the Cold War and give an outline of what happened during it.

The new course places a large emphasis on analysing sources (images, documents, letters and speeches). You will need to be able to recognise bias, propaganda, prejudice, etc.

You will be asked basic comprehension questions (as you’ve seen above) but there will also be times when you will be asked to use the skills of a historian that you’ve developed over the last 3 years (your CBA work will also help here). Below, you will find an example to help make this clearer.