We know as teachers that content knowledge is crucial to exam success, however students also need to be able to interpret and understand the exam questions. Exam questions can be dense, loaded with words and hard to interpret (often by design!). Investing some time in looking at exam questions together, using the ready-to-go worksheets and activities here, might pay dividends when it comes to exam time and move students from knowledge to understanding; and understanding to application!
STEP 1: Question the question
Before approaching an exam style question, you can unpack and discuss the question verbally with the class:
Let students ask questions, dissect and deconstruct each of the above. This can be an open or closed book activity. Ideas can be recorded on whiteboards, flash cards, butchers paper or made as annotations. Deep and meaningful understanding is achieved by provocative questions, which promote inquiry and reflection, rather than simply dictating the answers. This takes time and can be self to self or self to peer, self to class.
Word walls: to help students articulate their thoughts.
Class activity:
Project an Edrolo review or past external exam question on the board.
Highlight the cognitive verb and the mark allocation. Discuss as a class what students think they need to do.
Highlight the limiting terms: they state what other things need to be done in the question (e.g. refer to a source or quote). Qualifying terms often have hidden meanings – for example, “explain” is very different to “explain the importance” because “importance” implies some level of analysis (cause and effect, achieving goals etc).
Highlight the content term.
Example A
Useful tip:
Students can remember the 3 categories of key terms as CLC:
Cognitive verb
Limiting term
Content term
STEP 2: Plan and write a response
Use a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) to see and set a clear success criteria.
Edrolo’s Progress Check and Topic Test questions have pre-written WAGOLLS each with video solutions and explanations of the criteria. These can be projected onto the board and used in backwards mapping activities, allowing students to individually or collaboratively self mark their own work. After students have marked their own work, you then come over the top and, rather than mark more work, you simply “mark their marking” to “judge their judgement”
Colour coding can be done based on the school writing structure e.g. TEE, SEE, PEEL, TEEL, IDEAL as a class or independently.
Use the graphic organiser to get students to plan their thoughts down based on their own learnings, notes from class and the WAGOLLS.
Students can then write their responses with the WAGOLL accessible, hidden, or particularly accessible. The word wall can be helpful in this process.
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