AQA 7042 · C3.16 - From description to analysis and substantiated judgement
Learn to turn relevant description into analysis, use sources and interpretations to test an argument, and develop your own judgement with evidence and reasoning. Fictional examples help you recognise these moves without handing over any part of a live Historical Investigation.
Description supplies evidence; analysis uses it
Description tells the reader what happened, what a source says or what an historian argues. It is necessary: an argument without accurate information has nothing to work with. The problem comes when description becomes the destination rather than the starting point.
Analysis explains a relationship that matters to the question. It might show how a development caused an outcome, why a change was limited, how one factor interacted with another, or why evidence strengthens or weakens a claim. Evaluation then weighs that relationship against a stated criterion, such as reach, duration, depth or relative importance.
| Move | What it does | Diagnostic question |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Reports relevant information | What happened, or what does this evidence say? |
| Analysis | Explains how the information bears on the question | How or why does this change the answer? |
| Evaluation | Weighs the strength or significance of that relationship | How far does it matter, and by what criterion? |
| Substantiated judgement | Gives a conclusion supported by selected evidence and reasoning | What is my answer, and what makes it defensible? |
Consider a wholly invented practice enquiry: “To what extent was the opening of the fictional Greybridge Institute in 1912 the main reason adult literacy rose in Norchester between 1880 and 1980?” Nothing about Greybridge or Norchester is authentic historical evidence, and none of these fragments belongs in an assessed investigation.
- Fragment A: “The Greybridge Institute opened in 1912 and offered evening classes.” This describes a development.
- Fragment B: “By offering classes after working hours, the Institute reduced one barrier to adult study, so its opening could have accelerated literacy among workers who had previously been unable to attend.” This analyses a mechanism linked to the enquiry.
Fragment B still needs evidence and comparison before it can sustain a judgement that the Institute was the main reason. Analysis is therefore not simply adding “this was important”; it makes the connection open to testing.
Keep every reasoning move focused on the question
An analytical investigation is selective. It does not reward every fact found during research equally; it selects evidence because of the work that evidence can do in answering the exact question. In the fictional enquiry, “main reason” requires a relative judgement. Showing that the Institute made some difference is not enough: its explanatory power must be weighed against a credible alternative across the period named.
A useful reasoning move has three connected elements:
- Target: identify the precise claim or part of the question being tested.
- Connection: explain the mechanism or relationship revealed by the evidence.
- Consequence for the answer: state whether the evidence strengthens, qualifies or weakens the claim, and why.
Suppose the fictional background record also says that municipal night schools expanded from 1895 and that compulsory schooling affected younger generations from 1901. Those details should not become a second narrative. They matter because they create a comparison: the Institute may have been an immediate local accelerator, while earlier schooling provision may have had wider and more durable reach.
“Balanced” does not mean giving every factor the same space or refusing to decide. It means engaging with a serious counter-explanation and weighing it by a consistent criterion. A judgement may still rank one factor first if the reasoning explains why its reach, depth or durability outweighs the alternative.
Relevance is a relationship, not a topic label: evidence is relevant when you explain what it changes about the answer to the set question.
Put sources and interpretations inside the reasoning
AQA requires primary sources and historical interpretations to be integrated into analysis and evaluation. Integration does not mean mentioning a source or an historian and then returning to a separate argument. It means using that material to test a claim and showing its effect on the developing answer.
The following practice material is entirely NovaLearn-authored and fictional:
- Fictional primary-source fragment: an invented Norchester Workers' Association report dated 1932 states that long shifts still prevented many adults from attending evening classes. This is not a real document or quotation.
- Fictional interpretation fragment: an invented Historian A argues that generational change through schooling mattered more than any single adult-education institution. This is not the view of a real historian.
A mention-only fragment would report that the workers' association discussed long shifts. An integrated reasoning fragment would explain that the report qualifies the claim about access: evening opening removed a timetable barrier only partly if working hours still prevented attendance. The fictional interpretation then supplies a competing explanation. The earlier contextual record about schooling can be used to test it: it supports a long-term generational mechanism, but it does not by itself prove that adult institutions made no independent contribution.
Notice the direction of thought:
claim under test → supplied evidence → contextual reasoning → effect on the answer
The source and interpretation do not make the judgement for the student. They provide material from which the student must form and substantiate a view.
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