Teaching Sociological Skills: Application (2)

In my previous post, I highlighted three areas where marked are gained for 'application' style exam questions. Let's look at each of these in turn:

 1. Material drawn from an item 

Most straightforward and become more commonplace with the new 10-mark questions on Papers 1, 2 and 3 of the A Level Specification. Each item will have a series of ‘hooks’ and depending upon the level of application required for a question these can be compulsory to get out of the bottom band, or merely a hint at how the student can structure their essay (30-mark questions).

 2. Application to the question 

How does the material a student has chosen, answer the question? For example, this summer I marked over 500 scripts on paper 1 and there were some outstanding answers. There were also some not so great, that threw everything they knew about the theoretical aspects of education hoping that something would stick. A prime example of this was ‘role allocation’. The more successful students explained that role allocation transmitted the idea of meritocracy, whereas other simply described role allocation. The simplest way to get credit for application in this instance is by using essay structures such as PEEEL or PERC or simply by instructing students to make sure each paragraph answers the question.

 3. Application of material that is not commonly taught together 

This is the most problematic for students. Post-exams Twitter was awash with students confused by the questions, particularly how changing gender roles impacted on childhood experience. Tutor2u’s own analysis has shown that the questions with this form of application are the weak points in exam performance. It is this area of the exam that has surprised most teachers as well and emphasises the shift in topics like education and family, from being examined at AS level to being examined at full A level.

Over the next few blog posts of the ‘The Secret Examiner’, I will be looking at techniques that teachers and students can use to improve on a student’s use of application in the exams. Some are very simple and may mean a slight shift in how we question students, whilst others require a seismic shift in how we organise our schemes of work and how we teach Sociology at A level.

As always, we at Tutor2u will be looking at resources and teaching methods that can help you get the best out of your students.