“Miss, are you doing revision tonight?”
“Of course I am.”
“Miss, can you do that revision in the morning before school again?”
“Of course”
These are the frequent asked from our Year 11 and 13s during this time of year
In my department, we have been revising since September with Year 11. This is not an attempt to be super amazing teachers but a frantic attempt to fill any gaps as we race through the content that we felt was too dense for a 2-year course. At writing, I still have 2 lessons left for my Year 11s and that is with severely reduced time focussed on exam question practice.
So this year, I’ve been left thinking how do I balance out general knowledge revision with exam question practice. I wanted to ensure my students were revising content, but also that they understood the demands of the questions.
Below are 4 ways that you can use exam question practice to reinforce knowledge which practicing exam questions.
1 – BUG the question
This is something taken from our wonderful Geography department and has worked wonders with the million and one different exam stems in AQA History GCSE. (I have used this with A Level to some success, but a slightly more complex version is needed I think, which I’m currently working on)
How it works: Give students an exam question, then using the acronym BUG, they must decode it to help with their understanding. I have the students annotate the question so I can see their thought process. I always do this with them on the board or using a visualiser the first few times to ensure they understand.
B - Box the command words
U – Underline the knowledge focus
G - Glance at the marks
EXAMPLE: How useful are sources B and C to an historian studying the causes of the Vietnam war? [8 marks]
B – Box: “How useful” – This tells me that I can talk about the content and the author in this exam questions
U – Underline: “Causes of the Vietnam war” – What do I know about the causes?
G – Glance: “[8 marks]” – For this question that means 2 paragraphs and a conclusion.
2 – ACE Assessment
Credit here goes to @MrsHumanities. I used this once last year and haven’t looked back since. It is such an incredible tool to impart knowledge, encourage improvement in writing and focus on exam technique.
How it works: Students are given a paragraph/answer to an exam question that is average and they use the ACE assessment criteria to improve it. I usually write these paragraphs myself so I can focus on what I want the students to get out of it. For example, I will deliberately leave out examples, or the explain, or a key word in the question.
A – Accept: Students tick where they accept the written work
C – Challenge: Students put a question mark and write a question where they aren’t sure why something has been said, or it needs more explanation
E – Extend: Students add their own knowledge to extend the answer and improve it.
Before I set students off, get the class to create the ‘success criteria’ on the board for that question. This way you can assess if they understand what the question is asking of them and when they are completing the task they also have a prompt of what to look for. For example, the success criteria might say; specific knowledge, uses words in the exam question, has a conclusion. This helps focus the task.
DIFFERENTIATE IT DOWN: To make this more accessible, sometimes I provide the students with the key information they HAVE to include.
CHALLENGE: Students have to rewrite the whole answer using the paragraph and their improvements. This is good if you only give one paragraph of an answer as they then have to create the second one.
3 – Guided Analysis
I got this from my colleague Claire (@Ms_C_Allen). We found that reading of interpretations was something that students struggled with and she tried to find a way to encourage an understanding of the process of reading and analysing both sources and interpretations. From this the activity of guided analysis was born.
How it works: Students are given the extracts with questions built around the interpretations for them to answer. The questions can be as simple as “what was happening at the time of this interpretation?” or “what was life like in x for x?”. This activity works well as it gets students to understand the process when approaching the with the AQA History convincing questions that requires students to support the interpretation with their own knowledge.
4 – Question planning with random facts (I’m working on the name of this one…)
I teach Politics as well as History, and in politics students are meant to use up to date examples. I listen to NPRPodcasts which constantly feeds me those examples, however, I am sure that my students do NOT listen to these. So I devised a way to give these little bits of information during the process of planning essay answers.
How it works: I have an A3 sheet with 6 exam questions on and space beneath them to produce a small plan. I also have an A4 sheet with bullet pointed examples, these are in no particular order and they can be as vague as “Paul Ryan has said he won’t re run for the house.” Students have to match up the pieces of evidence to the appropriate exam questions. This works well as when the evidence can be matched with multiple questions as it gets the students having to think what particular examples can be used in different questions. This idea can be turned into a starter activity where students have to decide which facts are relevant or not to the question.
As always, these are incredibly scaffolded ideas, but with most things once students know how they work you can bring back the scaffolding and ensure they are working more independently.
