Practising BUSS4 Exam Technique - Colour Your Way to Success!

During our recent CPD days on AQA BUSS4 Section A several teaching colleagues were able to share approaches and techniques that have worked well for them. In this blog entry, David Rees from Oldham Hulme Grammar School explains a colourful way to improve exam skills...

David Rees writes...

Show students a BUSS4-style essay question on an area they've just covered. Then show a short video clip that illustrates a good commercial example for support material, or give them an article to read.

Write a sample paragraph from an answer to the question on the board. But write content in black, application in green, analysis in blue and evaluative points in red marker (points do occasionally overlap – especially analysis and application, but then you can write it in one colour and underline in another). Give students different coloured biros or just get them to underline sections in matching coloured pencils as they copy it down. This gets the point across about making a conscious effort to display each of the four assessment objectives.

Then they can have a go at writing the next paragraph, which may add to the one they've already got or present a counter argument to it.

After this they can split into four groups or pairs and be issued with short points on different coloured cards – e.g. all blue cards contain ONE analytical statement, green application, red evaluative, etc. The pair/group with the white cards (and black type for Content points) starts the class off on their paragraph by picking a suitable content point from their cards that makes a valid start to answering the question (some content points would be unsuitable so those cards should not be chosen – e.g. they could be arguments against, when the answer needs an argument in support, etc). Then the group/pair with the green cards picks one of their application statements that complements the content point that has been raised, then the blue table attempts to develop it with an appropriate analysis point and the red table ends with an evaluative statement, thus constructing an answer. This is a great way to show some differentiation in the classroom, as the weaker students can be given the black points, the brighter ones the red points, etc. OR, counter-intuitively, the weaker ones who have never been able to evaluate can be given the red cards, and so on. Or groups can be a mixture of brighter and weaker students deliberately mixed together – great to show in a lesson plan!

The beauty of this exercise is that there are so many different – but equally valid - combinations of points to answer the same question, depending on the particular sentences the groups pick. It’s almost like a game of dominoes, where the next player’s move depends on the move selected by the previous player. This gets across the idea that there is no set way of answering a particular question. It can even reassure the weaker ones, or the ones who are doubting their essay-writing ability and subject knowledge that a lot can be made from quite a limited range of knowledge and applied case study information.

The last point also addresses this issue that many students have in BUSS4 of feeling overwhelmed by the volume of case study information they think they have to learn. And it coaches them how to construct analytical answers that avoid the trap of simply writing a story. An answer like that would be written in exclusively green ink!!!

A really ambitious version would be to START with the red cards first, and work backwards. As an examiner I’ve found that many of the stand-out A* answers have actually contained some paragraphs that have started with an evaluative statement and then the following answer has worked back from it. Maybe just to be attempted with the brighter classes though!!!