The pressure of the exam can cause so much distress that learners automatically forget how brilliant they are. I am a huge fan of doing everything possible to settle and calm nerves before exams. I remember in the opening year of a small school I was in buying pan au chocolat, cereal bars and hot chocolate for the 12 year 11 learners on the day of their exams. It is always something I have done, maybe it is the areas I work in but breakfast seems to be a meal we, as education providers, often supply. No more so on exam day.
I began thinking about ways to embed the exam throughout the year in an effort to reduce some of the stress of the actual event. Every lesson includes and exam question, printed from the exam so it looks and feels like the real thing. After a couple of years of this I asked one of my repeat repeaters what was happening when he got into the exam and he said there’s just so much stuff to remember he kept making mistakes on the easy parts.
I then began building a bank of hints and tips that I could embed into my lessons that I called save the space. The idea is to give learners more space to remember the stuff that they find hard. Here are a few examples:
Number line
I am a big fan of a -10 to +10 number line somewhere on the exam booklet. Once it’s down it can be referred to and the learner can jump from one to another hopefully doing addition and subtraction of negative numbers a little easier. Even if the numbers are more sophisticated the number line may remind them of the concept of whether a number gets larger or smaller.
Get out of jail 2,3,5,7,11
I teach prime factor decomposition with the first 5 primes written all over the place. I call them the get out of jail free numbers and say one branch on the decomposition must be one of the top 5 primes! I then use the first 5 primes again in simplifying fractions. It is essentially divisibility checks but in my experience if you mention the word division panic sets in for many learners so giving them the divisibility checks as a helpful hint overcomes that panic.
360o protractors.
Every year around February I will ask the head of department I am in what equipment they have for the exam. I understand in the outside world if you turn up to your job without the correct equipment it is your responsibility and no one will help you out. Maybe it is the area I work in or my empathy for the learners going through the exam again not for the first time. Whatever the reason I always provide equipment. I always encourage the department to buy 360o protractors. Again it just helps ease learners stress in the exam when working with bearings
Faces Edges and Vertices
There is so much for students to remember in exams. In my private tutoring work I always say my job is to get you ready for your exam, your teacher is teaching you. When I am the teacher in front of a group of resitters it is both my job to get them ready for the exam and teach them! So a little thing I like to do is to teach faces, edges and vertices using your hand, forearm and elbow. Put your hand in front of your face, this is a face! Your forearm is the edge and your elbow is the vertex. The hope is that students will re-enact this in the exam on the low grade 3D shape property questions and save some valuable brain space for the more challenging topics. Plus it provides the invigilator some entertainment in the exam!
