After understanding the of the basics of the exhibition, your next step is to grasp how it is evaluated and marked, which is outlined in the assessment instrument. Your TOK teacher will give you a copy of this, or you can find it online in the subject guide.
The overall assessment objective of the exhibition is to demonstrate how TOK manifests in the real world. To do this, the assessment instrument looks for four different skills.
Members of the site have access to much more support for the TOK assessments, including lesson presentations, real-world examples, and advice on making links to the course, such as via the key concepts. Join us in seconds here!
Step 1 – Understand the TOK exhibition rubric
1. Interlinking ideas
Your exhibition commentary should clearly explain the links between the objects you have chosen, and the IA prompt, and explicit references are made to the selected IA prompt.
2. Justifying ideas
Your commentary should include a strong justification for why you have chosen your objects for the exhibition. This should be done within the context of the core theme, or one of the optional themes.
3. Using evidence
All the points you make in your commentary should be well-supported by evidence. In other words, all of your ideas and opinions should be supported by real-life situations, or the ideas of key thinkers.
4. Identifying the real-world context
The exhibition clearly identifies three objects and their specific real-world context. These means choosing actual objects (or images of objects), rather than generic objects.
A 3-minute guide to the TOK exhibition
Our three-minute explainer video goes over the basics of the TOK exhibition, discussing the relationship between the prompts, the objects, and the context you’re meant to create your commentary.
You’ll find more videos on this and other aspects of TOK here, and you can dive into much more depth via our free and premium webinars, here.
More support for the TOK exhibition
Make sure you have access to all the documents and online material supporting the exhibition. These include the TOK subject guide, where you’ll find the IA prompts, and the exhibition rubric, and the exemplar TOK exhibitions (found in ‘MyIB’, which is accessible to teachers).
Follow the links above to take you to the three different elements of the TOK exhibition; we’ve also created a page giving some tips on how to put on your exhibition if your school is running a public ‘exhibition day’ which you can visit here. It suggests ways of presenting ideas to an audience.
If your school is a member of theoryofknowledge.net, we have designed a series of lessons on the exhibition, with a three practice exhibition tasks. These will familiarize you with the IA prompts, how to select effective objects, and the assessment rubric. If you are signed into the site, you can access these lessons here.
You can also find out our thoughts on the TOK exhibition (and the TOK essay) in several webinars that we have delivered. You can see these webinars on this page of the site.
Subscribe to our free monthly TOK newsletter
Our newsletter, The Examined Life, delivers 8 thought-provoking real-world stories to your inbox, three of which we unpack in detail to challenge assumptions, introduce brilliant thinkers, and build a library of examples for your essay, exhibition, and UA portfolio.
It is the easiest way to stay connected to the ideas that matter most and develop the habits of authentic critical thinking. Subscribe here.