Stepping Stones - Developing Exam Skills (Analysis)

As many people are winding down at the end of a busy academic year, many teachers are turning their thoughts to the new academic year.

One issue that I keep get asked about is ways to develop students exam skills.

I was looking back through some of my old lessons recently and I found this analogy that I used with my new Year 12 group.

As a teacher of AQA, the focus is on developing good application (gAP) and good analysis (gAN). This blog is about developing gAN.

One way to develop students understanding of the difference between rAN (reasonable analysis) and gAN is to use the analogy of stepping stones across a river.

Apart from swimming across, you can leap from one side to the other or walk over the stepping stones to get to the other side. Leaping from one side to the other is rAN whilst walking over the stepping stones is gAN.

So, lets take the example of a manufacturing business that prides itself on producing a quality product which is its USP. The business currently uses a soft HR strategy where staff have lots of responsibility. Kaizen and quality circles are key features of the business. A new CEO is employed who wants to move towards a more flexible workforce and introduce a harder HR strategy. A typical question might be to analyse the consequences of introducing a hard HR strategy into this business.

Leaping across the river might lead to the following:

‘a move towards a harder HR strategy may lead to a more demotivated workforce and therefore poorer quality and less sales’ (rAN).

Here, the student has made a ‘leap’ straight from a demotivated workforce to poorer quality and less sales.

A stepping stones response might look something like this

‘a move towards a harder HR strategy may mean that staff have less responsibility and less involvement in their work. This could therefore lead to a more demotivated workforce. In turn, staff may place less focus on quality and participate less in the firms quality circles which could therefore lead to a poorer quality product. The effect of this might be that they lose the USP that they are known for which could therefore reduce sales for the business’ (gAN)

In the above example, we can clearly see the ‘steps’ that the student has taken in order to get from one side to the other.

Sometimes, big steps are not always the best…..