Teaching Exam Technique - Improving Exam Answers

Team work makes the dream work!

Relevant for A-Level

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas and a well-earned break. Now that we're into mock season, I thought it would be appropriate to think about how we can make the most of assessment feedback.

If your students are anything like mine, you'll sometimes mark assessments and think 'Did I not teach them anything!?' Once I've recovered from my initial disappointment (and sometimes hysterics at the things they can make up!), I often find that students have really struggled on particular questions, which has then had a negative impact on their overall grade. I know they're capable of more, but their grades don't reflect this.

Consequently, I wanted some strategies that I could use to help students to improve their answers on assessments, and particularly their answers to extended questions as these seem to suffer the most under exam conditions. When I reflected on my feedback lessons, I realised that they were entirely focused on individual improvements. Therefore, I was under-utilising my greatest resource - the other students in the class. Team work makes the dream work! So I started to think about how I could make feedback lessons more collaborative so that students can discuss ways to improve their answers, and yet still offer time for individual reflections and improvements. I am sure that there are many ways to do this effectively, but I've settled on three strategies that work well for me and my students. I teach the extremes of mixed ability, so I focused on strategies that I thought would work well for mixed-ability groupings but would also be effective using ability groupings.

A few things to note before we get into the strategies:

1. These strategies are designed for the AQA A-level, but could be adapted for the new GCSE specifications, especially with their greater emphasis on extended writing, and other A-Level specifications.
2. My school uses a DIRT and pink pen of progress policy for written feedback. Students are given Directed Improvement and Reflection Time after they are given their marked work so that they have a significant period of time to make improvements. Their improvements are then highlighted in pink to show their progress, and this makes marking much easier as their additional work stands out.
3. My school uses a bronze, silver, gold medal system for differentiation. This can be used to give students choice (so they can complete either the bronze, silver or gold task) or they can work their way up the medals to earn gold and go from the 'easiest' task to the most 'difficult.' We then use challenge tasks to really extend the thinking of the top end.
4. Some of these strategies require students to trust each other to be respectful about their work. I make it very clear at the beginning of the lesson that they are going to be looking at the work of their classmates and so it is extremely important that the comments are constructive. As my school uses peer assessment frequently, the students are used to this and I've never had any issues using any of these strategies.
5. I'm pretty sure I read about these strategies somewhere and then tweaked them for my own use so I can't take full credit.

Strategy 1 - Best Test Paper

When marking a test, students' marks are recorded for each question on a spreadsheet instead of on their work. They are then given an overall mark for their test, but not marks for each individual question.

In the lesson, students are divided into groups of three (I prefer mixed ability groupings for this one, but ability groups also work well). Each student is given their own test paper, and each group is given one blank copy of the test. The group is then tasked to review their answers to each question together (each question is labelled in terms of bronze, silver and gold for level of challenge) and discuss what the best answer would be. They then write these onto the blank copy. Towards the end of the lesson, their ideas are shared as a class, and students use the ideas they agreed upon to make improvements to their original test papers.

Recently, I trialled getting students to take more ownership over this process. As a group, they selected the questions they felt that they most needed to work on together. They chose one knowledge (bronze), one application (silver) and one extended answer (gold) question to focus on together. This worked particularly well and is something I will be using again in the future.

Strategy 2 - Best Examples

When marking essays, students' marks are recorded in a markbook instead of on their work. In the lesson, each student is given their own essay and a copy of the three best essays in the class (after getting their permission). In pairs, students work together to fulfil the success criteria opposite. The challenge task is to plan a collaborative answer to a different essay question that would demonstrate the features of a top band essay. All of the ideas are then fed back to the class, and they agree on a list of features of a top band essay.

Students then make improvements to their own essays, and are given the opportunity to resubmit if they would like to earn a higher grade. To really challenge your students, this could be modified slightly so that they submit a completely new essay to test that they can apply the features of top band essays to a new section of content.

Strategy 3 - Matchy Matchy

When marking essays, students are given feedback on a slip of paper (without their name on) rather than on their work. In the lesson, they are divided into mixed-ability groups of four. This allows students to see a range of answers and the bottom end get some concrete examples of how to structure high quality answers.

Each group receives the four essays belonging to them and the four strips of paper. They work together to fulfil the success criteria opposite. Generally, I make the challenge task similar to the one in strategy 2.

Students then use the feedback to make improvements to their own essays, incorporating as many of the features of a top band essay as possible.  

Whilst these activities do take a significant amount of time, I would highly recommend them. With regular use, my students have greater confidence in marking exam answers and identifying essays that fit into different bands of the mark scheme. Over time, and in conjunction with other strategies, this has massively improved the quality of their extended answers. Give it a go and let me know how it works out.