DP Science Cafe
About
Not a revision course. A twenty-minute stop to find your bearings and refresh a concept, then back to your past papers.
What this is
A place to take a break, find your bearings, refresh a few concepts and get back on track. The navigation is the syllabus: subject, theme, topic, statement, using the IB's own names and codes. Open any page and you can see the whole course and where you are in it.
What this is not
It is not a revision course and it is not a question bank to grind through. Multiple-choice questions are a quick way to check what you recognise. About a quarter of your IB grade is multiple choice (Paper 1A); the rest asks you to write, calculate and interpret data, and to carry out an investigation. The research on learning is consistent that practice which makes you recall and construct an answer — past-paper questions, done properly and marked against the mark scheme — produces the most durable learning. That is your revision. This site is the twenty minutes around it.
Why the questions are built the way they are
Every wrong answer on this site is a documented misconception, and you see why it is wrong the moment you answer. Two findings shape that. Unexplained multiple choice can teach you the wrong answer: students later reproduce the distractors as facts (Roediger & Marsh, 2005), and feedback removes the effect (Butler & Roediger, 2008). And multiple choice whose wrong options are plausible makes you do real retrieval work, which helps you remember related material too (Little, Bjork, Bjork & Angello, 2012). Retrieval practice of any kind beats re-reading (Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017); recall-based practice generally beats recognition (Kang, McDermott & Roediger, 2007; Dunlosky et al., 2013).
Who makes it
James R. Martin — physicist (MSci, Bristol), teacher (PGCE, Oxford), and a one-to-one tutor of IB and GCSE sciences for over a decade. Material is compiled from the current IB guides and a purpose-built question bank, and reviewed topic by topic; each page states its review status at the top. The process is set out in How these pages are made.
Sources
- Adesope, O. O., Trevisan, D. A., & Sundararajan, N. (2017). Rethinking the use of tests: A meta-analysis of practice testing. Review of Educational Research, 87(3), 659–701.
- Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). Feedback enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory & Cognition, 36(3), 604–616.
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Kang, S. H. K., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2007). Test format and corrective feedback modify the effect of testing on long-term retention. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19(4–5), 528–558.
- Little, J. L., Bjork, E. L., Bjork, R. A., & Angello, G. (2012). Multiple-choice tests exonerated, at least of some charges. Psychological Science, 23(11), 1337–1344.
- Roediger, H. L., & Marsh, E. J. (2005). The positive and negative consequences of multiple-choice testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(5), 1155–1159.
- International Baccalaureate Organization. Biology guide, first assessment 2025, updated May 2026.