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Walking Talking Mocks

Improving students' exam techniques

Richard Bentley explains the rationale behind this extremely useful way of improving students' confidence in their exam technique and the way they have implemented this in the PE department.

We first started running these mocks last year with our year 11 GCSE PE group. Having had a set of results previously that were very frustrating, we decided we needed to focus the students more on their exam technique. Their performance in the previous tests showed a lot of silly mistakes ranging from misreading the question completely, not giving enough separate points in their answers and disregarding the command word of the question.

How does it work?

The walking talking mock walks the class through the exam at a pace set by the teacher. The questions are shown individually on the board and the key elements of the question are made clear to the students. Students answer the questions and move on when the teacher tells them to. At no point does the teacher give, or allude to, any answers, they simply help the students to unpick the question.

We use the CHK technique to unpick the question with the Command word, what they Have to do and the Knowledge highlighted to them. These key parts then stand out to the students and it shows exactly what the question is about. We will also highlight to them the number of marks the question is worth and remind them to give enough separate points/examples for the marks available.

Impact?

Each time we have used this process the students have performed much better and the number of silly mistakes has drastically lowered.

When the students see the results we then emphasise the importance of them applying this exam technique every time they sit a paper or answer a question. It is a very powerful way of showing them how much of a difference it can make. We have seen students really get on board with the technique and start to independently use it in lessons, homework and exams.

What it also shows us as a department is the gaps in their knowledge. We know that any wrong answers are coming from them not knowing the correct answer as opposed to them misreading a question and making a silly mistake. Our intervention and revision lessons then become very focussed and structured towards the common areas of weakness or specific topics.

Powerpoint of the presentation is available to download below.