Edexcel IGCSE Geography
River Enquiry Skills
The Big Idea: A good river fieldwork enquiry is a full story — you collect real data (primary) and background data (secondary), present it properly on graphs, analyse it with maths like the mean, spot and explain the weird results (anomalies), reach a conclusion, and then honestly judge how good your whole investigation really was.
Quick Summary
- Primary data = data you collect yourself in the field (e.g. river width, depth, velocity).
- Secondary data = data collected by someone else (e.g. Environment Agency discharge records, OS maps, Met Office rainfall).
- Different data types suit different graphs: line graphs for cross-sections, bar graphs to compare sites, scattergraphs to show relationships between two variables.
- Quantitative data (numbers) gets analysed using statistics — most commonly the mean.
- Qualitative data (photos, field sketches) is analysed by annotation — labelling what you see and explaining why it looks that way.
- An anomaly is a result that doesn't fit the pattern — you need to spot it AND explain a plausible cause.
- A conclusion says whether your hypothesis was proved or disproved, using the data as evidence.
- An evaluation honestly judges the whole enquiry — collection, analysis, reliability — and says what you'd change next time.
1. Presenting Your Data
Primary Data — What YOU Collected
Primary data is any data you personally went out and measured during your river fieldwork — things like river width, depth, velocity (speed of flow), or bedload size. Because you're the one who collected it, you're also responsible for presenting it clearly and accurately.
Think of it like being a scientist writing up an experiment: the raw numbers on their own don't tell a story. A graph turns a boring table into something you (and an examiner) can instantly interpret — "oh, the river gets deeper downstream" jumps out at you from a line graph in a way it never would from a table of five numbers.
Which Graph For Which Job?
Line graph → river cross-sections (shape of the channel)
Bar graph → comparing values between different sites
Scattergraph → relationship between two variables (e.g. width vs discharge)
In plain English: use a line when you're tracing a shape (like the riverbed), use bars when you're comparing separate things side by side, and use dots (scattergraph) when you want to know if two things are connected — like whether a wider river also has more discharge.
Why a scattergraph specifically?
A scattergraph is the only graph type here that can show a
relationship between two data sets. If you plot river width on one axis and discharge on the other, and the dots trend upwards, that's evidence discharge increases as the river gets wider — a classic river enquiry finding (linked to the Bradshaw Model).
Worked Example — Completing a Bar Graph
A float was timed travelling between two points on a river. Here's the data collected by a group of students:
| Sample | Time taken (seconds) |
|---|
| 1 | 21.1 |
| 2 | 16.0 |
| 3 | 14.1 |
| 4 | 15.0 |
| 5 | 35.0 |
→ Samples 2, 3 and 5 were already plotted on the bar graph — you had to add bars 1 and 4.
→ Bar 1 needed to reach between 21 and 22 seconds on the y-axis (each small square = 1 second).
→ Bar 4 needed to sit exactly on the 15-second gridline.
→
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