Course Description

The Advanced Higher Geography course is an excellent skills-based course designed to give learners the opportunity to develop a wide range of transferable skills that are relevant to researching geographic phenomena and understanding and evaluating geographic issues.

The course requires learners to undertake a significant amount of independent work. As a result, it is excellent preparation for study at Further or Higher education level and gives learners a significant amount of freedom to investigate issues or topics that they find personally interesting or relevant.

Course Content

Both the Higher and National 5 course have the same mandatory units:

Unit 1: Geographic Skills: In this unit, learners will develop their knowledge and understanding of a wide variety of geographic methods and techniques and apply these in order to plan and carry out a significant piece of geographic research. As part of this learners will develop advanced map interpretation skills using both Ordnance Survey maps and Geographic Information Software. They will also gain experience using and evaluating a range of gathering and processing techniques in the context of research and fieldwork into different geographic topics. Finally, learners will develop their skills in handling complex geographic data including the interpretation and analysis of a variety of data sets.

Unit 2: Geographic Issues: In this unit, learners will develop their critical thinking skills in order to explore and evaluate sources and perspectives on current complex geographic issues. Learners will apply these skills by researching and critically evaluating an issue of their own choice.

Course Assessment

Throughout the Advanced Higher course, learners will work on an independent project folio which accounts for 67% of their final award. The portfolio consists of two significant pieces of work. The first is the geographical study in which learners are required to plan and undertake detailed research into a geographic issue of their choice and present and analyse their findings. The second is the geographical issue in which learners are required to critically evaluate a complex geographic issue by identifying viewpoints from a wide range of sources and evaluating these viewpoints in order to draw conclusions. The remaining 33% of the course award is assessed in a final exam. This contains questions on map interpretation, gathering and processing techniques, and geographic data handling.