What is the difference between being “convincing” and being “insightful and original”
Thanks
Kia ora,
The words, convincing, insightful and perceptive, refer to the quality of the conclusions you make from the information you find to answer your research questions.
If you look at a definition of the word ‘perceptive’, it might refer to ‘insight.’ This essentially means that you can pull meaning from what you see, hear or read as you study the information you find to answer your research questions. It’s the quality of that meaning that is assessed as being convincing or perceptive.
A convincing conclusion might be one that is clearly logical, but it might not be more than the obvious. A student might make connected statements that are built from the information they’ve gathered but there might not be much of their own thinking about what the information suggests about the issue they’re researching.
In this exemplar, the moderator has highlighted the convincing conclusions in yellow and numbered them with a ‘4’. You can see that the conclusions are convincing because they are connected to the purpose of the investigation and mostly address the questions posed.
A perceptive conclusion is one where you demonstrate your own insight. That’s where your thinking might be original.
If you have a look at the exemplar here you can see the bits in the student’s report that the assessor felt were perceptive highlighted in yellow and numbered with a 4.
Hope this helps. It’s a tricky distinction to get clear in your head and one that I’m sure your teacher would be happy to discuss with you if you are still unsure. It is worth noting though, that some research topics and focus questions will lead you to perceptive conclusions more easily than others. The first step, before you begin to find information, is to check with your teacher to make sure your topic and questions will support that level of thinking.
Good luck!
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