With the IGCSE courses that we are working on I have found that it is a lot easier to find resources for Maths and Science than it is for History. I have actually struggled to find the same quantity and quality of resources for History, something which has started to really get to me because it is actually not that easy guiding your kiddo on answering History questions. Anyway one of the resources that I recently bought was this book – Pearson Edexcel International GCSE History Depth Studies.

Now to begin with I am going to admit that I avoided this book because I did not think it was that practical. You only need to select 2 Depth Study topics and this book covers four depth study topics. So you are buying a book when you are only going to use 50% of it. And in comparision there are other books which just deal with the individual topics – so then you buy 2 books which only cover the 2 topics that you are studying. It also works out cheaper and to me it just made more sense. So I initially went with those books, and in all honesty we have found them good books. But I have struggled to find extra content on the internet (we always like to study using multiple sources) so after lots of searching I actually ended up buying us a copy of the Depth Study book so we could use it as one of our alternative resources.

So that is the background on why I did not initially buy this book. But now I must confess I actually really like this book, yes we are only going to use 50% of the content but I think the content and the way they have chosen to lay it out is excellent.

First off what does this book cover – If you kiddo is writing the Edexcel International GCSE History paper, they need to chose two Depth Study topics for Paper 1. In total there are 8 Depth Studies which you can chose from (you can choose which ever 2 you want). This book only cover 4 of the 8, so make sure you know what you want to cover before you buy it.

We have chosen to do Dictatorship and conflict in the USSR and A world divided: Superpower relations. So I have looked at these two sections in this book but at this stage I have not read the other two. That being said after just flipping through the other sections it is clear that all four sections are written in the same style and the same format.

Each topic is divided into chapters and at the end of these chapters you get a good Focus task and a nice chapter summary. I liked this.

The content itself is split into easy to manage paragraphs, they use lots of subheadings and often include bullet points and diagrams to highlight important information.

Along the side of the paragraphs there are smaller blocks which highlight important points or gives information about the sources. And yes they have included lots of very topical extracts throughout the chapters.

I have read all of the pages on the USSR Topic and I have to say I found them well worded, concise and easy to digest, but at the same time nothing was oversimplified. I really liked the writing style and the way they set out the information.

At the end of the book there is a final section called – Exam Guidance. It is roughly 18 pages long. In this section they take each of the three types of questions which you can expect to get in Paper 1 and deal with them individually. So they start with the Part a (the impression question), and they discuss how to answer it (my daughter who has read and listened to a few people talk about exam guidance she said she found this very helpful and that they explained something here which others had not made clear). After they discuss how to tackle the question they then give an example, showing a sample answer followed by another example for the kids to try themselves. I want to stress something they do this for every topic. So in other words for Part A they have one an example, a model answer and a 2nd example for each of the four topics. I thought this was brilliant.

I have really enjoyed having this book as a 2nd resource for our USSR Topic and I plan on using it for our Cold War topic as well.

We highly recommend this book.

Edit – if you want detailed question cards for this section there are a set on the TES website here – IGCSE History Dictatorship and Conflict in the USSR Question and Answer cards

Admin – I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and recommend. And just to make it clear we bought this book, this was not a review copy.