Edexcel Unit 1 Marking Exercise

When it comes to answering data-response questions, my students regularly make the same mistakes- in particular not evaluating their answers when required. Hopefully this activity will help to teach them the importance of evaluation, and what it actually means.

I’ve just set my year 12 students a set of data-response questions as homework and, for our next lesson, I intend to review the questions and highlight areas of common weakness. I’ve typed up some answers to their questions (2 of which are genuine student responses) which I will get them to mark at the start of the lesson. Hopefully they will take from this the importance of some key exam skills. For the first question, it’s about labelling your diagrams and referring to the data when asked to. For the next two, it’s about the importance of evaluating your answers- something which a number of students failed to do at all in their homework, and hence the importance of this activity.
The relevant resources can be downloaded as follows:
1. Marking exercise with sample answers
2. Markscheme
3. Question paper (this is a link to TES Resources, where a fellow teacher helpfully created the ‘mock’ exam paper I use for this homework)