Higher Order Exam Skills

by Katherine Parr,
Lead Teacher of Humanities

Structure Strips and 'On one hand and the other'

In order to prepare the students to answer longer marked questions, we have approached the idea of giving exam questions and including the ways to answer the question. The structure strips are aimed at training students to be able to approach higher order exam questions. The strips are laid out like the examples below:

 

Students are given the exact layout of the question including paragraphing. Within Humanities the use of SPaG correctly is awarded 3 marks in the paper. This means that students need to be aware that if they answer the question incorrectly, they cannot be awarded any SPaG marks. This way students can see how to lay out their answer as well as including paragraphs.

There are many different types of structure strips and these need to work alongside the acronyms within the subjects. Here we have high level command words such as ‘evaluate’ and ‘to what extent’. Within these questions students need to be able to give their own opinions after presenting facts either for or against, or the advantages and disadvantages of the topic. We have come up with a couple of ways to help the students achieve the answers to these in the most detailed way.


For the ‘to what extent’ questions every time students answer these they must start by saying where they sit on a line of between 100% of agreeing with the statement or not.

Then to be able to answer the question they must look at ‘on one hand’ and then ‘on the other’. See the layout below:

Using these methods the students should be able to create the perfect answer, as long as it is concluded at the end. These two methods are easy to remember and with enough practice will help the higher order thinking answer the questions.