Question 1

What is NCEA AS 91229 about?

Accepted Answer

You need to carry out a proper historical inquiry into a significant New Zealand event or place, from start to finish. This means picking a topic, asking focused questions, finding and annotating evidence, organising your sources, and then evaluating how well your inquiry process worked. The topic must matter to New Zealanders—it could be something that happened here, an international event that involved or affected NZ, and it needs to be relevant to your life today.

Question 2

What do students need to do for AS 91229?

Accepted Answer

1. Pick a historical event or place that matters to New Zealanders and develop clear, focused questions to guide your inquiry 2. Find evidence from multiple sources and add detailed notes explaining what each piece tells you and whether you can trust it 3. Choose the most useful evidence and properly record where it came from so others can check your work 4. Evaluate your inquiry by discussing what worked well, what was difficult, and what problems the evidence or your process had

Question 3

What's the difference between Achieved, Merit, and Excellence for AS 91229?

Accepted Answer

Achieved: You carry out a basic inquiry with some annotations on evidence, organise your sources, and identify straightforward strengths and weaknesses in what you found. Merit: You carry out an in-depth inquiry with detailed annotations that show clear links to your questions, and you provide a coherent (well-reasoned) evaluation that explains the reliability issues and process challenges you faced. Excellence: You carry out a comprehensive inquiry with perceptive (insightful) annotations showing careful analysis of evidence, and you give a perceptive evaluation that demonstrates sophisticated understanding of how evidence reliability and inquiry process issues affected your findings.

Question 4

What mistakes do students typically make in AS 91229?

Accepted Answer

1. Students do not evaluate their inquiry properly—they list problems without explaining why those problems matter or how they affected the reliability of their findings 2. When a historical person is involved (like Tāmati Aerahi or Winston Churchill), students write a biography instead of focusing on that person's specific role in or contribution to a significant event or movement 3. Students do not make enough annotations on their evidence or the annotations are too brief and do not explain how the evidence connects to their focusing questions

Historical inquiry

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