IB Extended Essay TopicsThe best essays should be geared towards high school or college level topics, but because there are so many extensions and IB courses available, I find that I still need to do a couple of research projects at home. In this article I will outline some topics that are easily extended and won't break your IB standards.

My favorite extension is one that involves the basic biology and how animals and plants work together to survive in the wild. In science you usually have two choices for how the evidence you are using fits into your argument. You can either look at the evidence directly, or you can build an argument from indirect evidence. Direct evidence generally takes one side of an argument and links it to another side of the argument. Indirect evidence takes both sides of an argument and connects them with the other side of the argument.

A great example of an IB essay extension is to extend an IB biology essay topic that has been discussing the roles of the senses in determining which prey species the animals of a species choose to eat. You might use a laboratory setting that includes lots of prey species, which you show by moving a line of sight across the board. This gives the impression that the animals are in total control of their food choices when in reality it is only partially true.

For an example of an IB chemistry topic, how do animals get water? The great thing about science topics is that they are really simple to extend. It's easy to expand on the topic, like how do animals get water through evaporation.

Another example of IB science topics that can be easily extended is on a topic on the evolution of mankind. For example, you could focus on different types of primitive men that existed thousands of years ago in Africa. One of the great things about science topics is that you can pull from a variety of different cultures and historians.

An IB college level English extension topic might be one that is used to get students to become better writers. Students may write a short story about a man who is obsessed with the word 'moment' and tries to break it into syllables, like there is no other way to describe it. In order to show how many words can mean, you might even write a short story where a few people use the word 'moment' in a sentence without any syllables in it, like it's just floating around in the air.

An IB High School level science topic could be one that is based on a scientific problem. One popular science topic that IB students use for their papers is how the answer to the question 'why do we need a soul?' is related to the question of how DNA exists in our body after death.

I could go on with examples of IB science topics that are easily extended. These are the topics that I tend to gravitate toward as a way to help my students figure out the best way to proceed in their IB coursework. The great thing about IB is that it is easy to stretch a standard essay topic so that it gets a little more involved and interesting for your students.