One key reason why students underperform in exams is because of a lack of precise focus on the question – often on the conceptual demands of the question. Typically, an examination presents a range of questions in a limited amount of time. Each question creates the possibility of losing crucial marks by mis-reading or mis-interpreting the question. Students must therefore be taught explicitly how to decode a question identifying the following key features:

• conceptual focus (for example, is it causation, significance, change and continuity?)

• content focus

• question type (do they need to describe, explain or reach a judgement? The student needs to understand that each question type requires a different approach. The phrase ‘How far do you agree?’ means you need to weigh the evidence for and against a statement before reaching a balanced judgement. ‘Explain why’ means that you need to explore a range of reasons why an event happened or why the pace of change during a period was fast or slow.

• date boundaries (What period are they expected to select information from?)

• marks available (a crucial guide for how much candidates are expected to write - many candidates spend too long on low tariff questions)

See example Page KP1-a

Long-term planning - it is important to develop students’ ability to decode questions at Key Stage 3. Therefore ask them to unpick the key concepts involved in enquiry questions and build in question types that mirror the style of questions that are asked at GCSE.

Question relevance

A related problem is that many students experience difficulty when faced with the complex task of selecting and rejecting information for a particular question – finding it difficult to ‘see’ that, out of a wide variety of facts and ideas, some are relevant and some are not. Many students resort to ‘including everything’ so as to avoid the difficult selection making process. This can lead to lengthy and unfocussed essays. This crucial skill of learning to select does not just happen – it needs to be taught explicitly through modelling the thought processes students need to go through. It is important that the teacher ‘thinks out loud’, explaining to the class why they would select one piece of information but choose not to use another piece as it is not relevant to that particular question.  In addition, to address the issue of students putting in too much information they can be provided with over-long answers that contain irrelevant information and given the task of cutting the answer down to a given word limit.

See example Pages KP1-b and c