Here is my attempt at writing an IA report for the new syllabus. What would you score it?
Please note the below IA is written on a topic that is unacceptable for the IB’s IA – it’s about child abuse. This has been done deliberately so it cannot be copied.
The Effects of Physical Abuse on Working Memory Capacity
Proposal for a Quasi-Experiment
Code: TJD058
Submitted: 06th April, 2026
Word Count: 2170 words
I. INTRODUCTION
- Problem: Low working memory capacity
- Population: Local high schoolers who are physically abused as children
- Impact of problem on population: Adds to their already existing problems, especially at school.
- Method: Quasi-experiment
- RQ: Does experiencing physical abuse as a child reduce working memory capacity in local high school students?
- Aim: To investigate the effects of childhood physical abuse on working memory capacity in local high school students.
Description of the Problem
Working memory is the information held in one’s conscious attention that we use to complete a task. Working memory capacity (WMC) is the amount of information we are able to hold in our minds at any one time. On average, we can hold about 4 units of information in our working memory. But not everyone’s WMC is the same. It varies amongst individuals and changes throughout our life. For example, it tends to increase throughout childhood and peaks around 30 (Alloway and Alloway, 2013). WMC is important because it’s correlated with many things, including IQ and academic achievement. Low WMC is a problem because it makes it hard to get good grades in school, which also means it’s harder to get into university and get a good job later in life. This might be why some studies have found that working memory capacity is related to success in life (Mashburne, Burgoyne and Engle, 2023). Therefore, the problem I’m investigating is low working memory capacity, which is the inability to hold much information in one’s conscious attention.
Impact of low WMC on people who are physically abused
Children who are physically abused are an important population of interest to study. The abuse they experience has long-lasting consequences on their physical and psychological health. It also affects their performance and behaviour at school. For example, a study in Spain ran a quasi-experiment comparing three groups of children (66 total kids): abused, neglected and a control group. They used questionnaires from teachers to measure the children’s behaviour. They found that abused and neglected kids had more behavioural problems at school when compared to the control group. Interestingly, they found that physically abused kids tended to have more internalizing behaviour problems, such as anxiety, depression and withdrawing from social interactions. Neglected children, on the other hand, had more externalizing problems, like aggression. The conclusion here is that maltreatment has negative impacts on children and abuse specifically might have more internal and perhaps cognitive effects (Paul and Arruabarrena, 1995). This is relevant to my investigation because it shows how abuse has a negative impact on the behaviour of children and I am investigating another potential negative effect of abuse which might make those behavioural problems worse.
Similarly, the negative impact of low WMC on kids who experience abuse is that it could cause more negative consequences on a their performance at school. They may have behavioural problems and learning problems caused by their low WMC. This is because, as stated earlier, WMC is correlated with and even a predictor of academic achievement. For example, one study found gathered data on 98 British preschoolers working memory, IQ and learning when they were in preschool and again six years later. They found that “…children’s working memory skills at 5 years of age were the best predictor of literacy and numeracy 6 years later.” They concluded that working memory is more important for academic achievement than IQ. (Alloway and Alloway, 2010) This is relevant to my investigation because it shows how low WMC could be yet another obstacle for abused children to face when trying to do well in school and life.
Therefore, this paper proposes a quasi-experiment with the aim of seeing if physical abuse reduces working memory capacity on local high school students.
II. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Choice of research method
A quasi-experiment is the proposed research method for this investigation. The independent variable is childhood physical abuse and the dependent variable is working memory capacity. A quasi-experiment is the best method to use here for two main reasons. Firstly, the aim of my experiment is to study a cause-and-effect relationship – the effect of abuse on working memory capacity. A quantitative, experimental method is the best option for this. While a true experiment is best to study causality, random allocation is not possible for this topic. That’s because I can’t randomly allocate people to get physically abused for ethical reasons, so existing groups need to be identified and studied. This is why a quasi-experiment is best.
Procedure
Participants: Our target population are teenagers aged 16-18 years old. That’s because these students are old enough to feel comfortable revealing their abuse as children, yet they’re probably still in school, which is important for studying WMC. It also means they can participate without parental consent and because it’s abuse this might help protect participants from further abuse (e.g. by an abusive parent who gets angry when they find out they’re taking part in this study). Having a narrow age range and sampling from similar schools means I can also keep the abuse and control groups as similar as possible with the only difference being their experiences of abuse. This reduces the number of extraneous variables and helps identify abuse as the independent variable.
Sampling Method: The sampling method would be a self-selected sample. Recruitment posters for the study would be published in physical and online locations. Physical locations include local school counsellor’s offices and online include posting to social media and making the pages shareable. Self-selected is the best method because I cannot find out for myself who has suffered abuse. People may also not want to discuss it. Therefore, if I use self-selected sampling only people who are comfortable talking about their abuse will volunteer for the study.
Setting: The best place to gather the data would be in the participants’ own schools. That’s because I want them to feel comfortable when completing the working memory tests. If I ask them to come to an unfamiliar location they might experience an increase in anxiety, which is known to reduce working memory as well. This could be an extraneous variable.
Ethical Considerations
The most important ethical considerations in this study are:
- Informed consent
- Anonymity
- Confidentiality
Informed consent is important because we’re gathering data on people’s experiences of being abused as children. This is a traumatic experience and giving this information to strangers without consent could cause psychological harm. That’s why I would use self-selected sampling and would include in the informed consent form details about the kinds of questions being asked.
Anonymity is especially important in this study because people might not want everyone to know about their traumatic childhoods. In the study, I could post the questionnaire via email to people who respond to our request for participants.
Confidentiality: To protect participants from further abuse from their parents, I would keep everyone’s participation in this study confidential. Because they’re over 16 they wouldn’t need to get parental consent so this wouldn’t be a problem.
III. DATA COLLECTION
Data Collection Tool and Decisions Made – Questionnaire
To figure out the two groups for the quasi-experiment and to measure the dependent variable, I have created a questionnaire (see Appendix I). The questionnaire consists of quantitative questions. The first question is a 10 item Likert-scale question asking for their self-reported level of childhood abuse they experienced. I could group participants who score 0-5 in the low abuse category and 6-10 in the high abuse category. This gives me the two conditions of my quasi-experiment. The Likert-scales means I can be objective about how I categorise people into which condition. This reduces the chances of researcher bias affecting the allocation to conditions.
Question 4 in the working memory scale is reverse scored. I did this to make sure people were actually reading the questions and not just ticking the same for every question. If someone is a “strongly agree” for 1, 2, 3 and 5 then they shouldn’t also be a 5 for #4. I could use this to consider excluding data, especially if it wasn’t consistent with the digit span score.
I have included two ways of measuring working memory – self-report and digit span score. This is to triangulate the self-report data. Some people might overestimate or underestimate their working memory abilities, so the digit span score is a more objective measurement that can help triangulate their self-reported scores.
Potential Challenges When Collecting Data
Three potential challenges when collecting data might be:
- Self-report and recall bias
- Participant variability
- Controlling other confounding variables on WMC
Recall bias might affect the validity of the data gathered. Recall bias is when people can’t accurately remember details. I would be surveying high schoolers and asking them to remember childhood abuse. They might misremember what actually happened, or can’t remember at all, which is common with trauma. Evidence from counsellors and social workers could be used as corroborating evidence, but this would need to be put in the informed consent form.
Participant variability: A major challenge with collecting accurate data with a quasi-experiment is the lack of controls over the variables. Ideally, I want the two conditions (high abuse vs low abuse) to vary only on the level of abuse. However, there are lots of factors that might also be different, like socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity and family structure (e.g. married vs divorced parents). These are issues because research has shown that adverse childhood experiences vary according to SES, ethnicity and family structure. This additional participant variability could be an extraneous variable and would be difficult to control.
Confounding variables on WMC: Other factors besides abuse can change WMC, including age and time of day. For example, Barner et al. found that memory performance changes through the day (better in the evening than the morning) (Barner et al., 2019). Therefore, one potential challenge is keeping these things consistent for all participants. Because I’m proposing going to different schools to gather the data on students, it would be hard to keep the time consistent for everyone.
IV. Discussion
Potential Findings
There are three potential findings my study could reveal:
- An effect in the direction expected – abused teenagers have lower WMC so we conclude that abuse reduces working memory capacity.
- An effect in the opposite direction – abused teenagers have higher WMC so we conclude abuse improves working memory capacity
- No effect – there are no significant differences found between both conditions
Implications on Policy/Practice
If the experiment did reveal a significant, negative effect of abuse on working memory capacity this could have important implications for policy and practice. Firstly, it could be used to campaign for additional assistance in schools for students suffering from abuse. If their WMC is impaired, they’ll probably find school harder so they could be given more support. Secondly, the findings could be used to encourage preventative measures. For example, the results could be shared during informational sessions for expecting parents. Instead of just being told “don’t shake the baby,” these findings could also be explained to give them more reasons why they shouldn’t abuse their kids. A final implication is that perhaps low WMC tests could be conducted on children in preschools and the results used as a possible detection for abuse. It’s often hard to spot a child who is being abused and parents obviously aren’t open about it all of the time. Giving preschoolers and young kids at school working memory tests could be one more way of identifying potential victims of abuse (i.e. a low score would be a potential red flag).
Researcher bias
One form of researcher bias that could affect my results is confirmation bias – because I have the hypothesis that childhood abuse reduces WMC, I might look for patterns in the data that confirm this belief. There are lots of ways I could analyse the data to support my hypothesis. For example, I could analyse the self-reported WMC data and the digit span test scores separately and choose the results that best supported my hypothesis.
Another reason researcher bias could affect the analysis is because my questionnaire makes it impossible to do a blind design – because the working memory scores and the experiences of abuse are on the same page in the questionnaire, I would know who is in which “condition” of the experiment. This might lead me to be subconsciously biased in my actions when administering the digit span test. For example, letting some participants re-start or have another go if they make a mistake.
Additional Method – Semi-structured Interviews
This quasi-experiment is designed to understand an effect of a major problem – child abuse. Another relevant research question is – why do people abuse their kids in the first place? If we could understand this, then we could potentially develop better interventions and preventions to stop it from happening. This would be better than trying to alter WMC after the damage has already been done. That’s why semi-structured interviews with parents guilty of child abuse could help to increase our understanding of abuse. Individual semi-structured interviews would probably work better than focus group interviews because parents probably wouldn’t be as open and honest because (hopefully) they’d be ashamed of their actions. However, in a one-to-one setting they might be feel more comfortable revealing their thoughts. The findings could reveal themes about when and why parents abuse their kids so we could do more to help prevent it.
REFERENCES
Alloway, T. P., & Alloway, R. G. (2010). Investigating the predictive roles of working memory and IQ in academic attainment. Journal of experimental child psychology, 106(1), 20–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.11.003
Alloway, T. P., & Alloway, R. G. (2013). Working memory across the lifespan: A cross-sectional approach. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25(1), 84–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2012.748027
Barner, C., Schmid, S. R., & Diekelmann, S. (2019). Time-of-day effects on prospective memory. Behavioural brain research, 376, 112179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112179
Dasen, P. R., Mishra, R. C., & Wassmann, J. (2018). Quasi-experimental research in culture sensitive psychology. Culture & Psychology, 24(3), 327–.doi:10.1177/1354067×18779043
de Paúl, J., & Arruabarrena, M. I. (1995). Behavior problems in school-aged physically abused and neglected children in Spain. Child abuse & neglect, 19(4), 409–418. https://doi.org/10.1016/0145-2134(95)00009-w
Mashburn, Cody A., Alexander P. Burgoyne, and Randall W. Engle, ‘Working memory, intelligence, and life success: Examining relations to academic achievement, job performance, physical health, mortality, and psychological well-being’, in Robert Logie, and others (eds), Memory in Science for Society: There is nothing as practical as a good theory (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Apr. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192849069.003.0007, accessed 12 Apr. 2026.
Maughan, B., & Rutter, M. (1997). Retrospective reporting of childhood adversity: issues in assessing long-term recall. Journal of personality disorders, 11(1), 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1521/pedi.1997.11.1.19
APPENDICES
Travis Dixon has been teaching for over 20 years and is an experienced IB Psychology, History and English teacher, author, workshop leader and examiner