Making the most of Mocks

Getting as much value as possible from mock exam feedback is crucial. Clearly, the specific style and approach will vary by subject, and there is no overall ‘best way’.  However, the below points are relevant across subjects.

1)      Think Diagnosis, Therapy, Testing

-  Form Diagnosesto articulate the learning gaps in student work

-  Plan Therapy– sustained attention to these gaps in and out of lessons between now and the summer

- Plan Testing–when and how will you retest students to establish if the therapy has worked

2)      Avoid overwhelming students with too much feedback in one go

-   Providing students with a long list of weaknesses or areas to improve in one go risks swamping working memory, so that students.

-  A ‘feedback lesson’ which covers multiple concepts in explaining what students have done well / wrong may be useful – however we do need to be mindful of working memory capacity.

-  Feedback which is spaced out, and returned to regularly between now and the summer, is most likely to have a sustained impact.

3)      Remember that learning gaps identified in feedback will need re-teaching

 -  Identifying gaps in itself will not move students on.

- Work to the principle that students would produce better work if they could.

- Therefore, when we set targets or give advice for  improvement, remember that these are areas that students don’t currently understand, or skills that students can’t currently perform – even if they seem obvious and you’ve taught them ten times already!

-  Setting targets for students but not providing them with direct input / teaching on what the target means / how to put it into action is just identifying what they can’t do. Targets will therefore need to be accompanied with teaching, modelling and practice.

                                                               i. Elearning can be a fantastic tool to manage the practicalities of this – by creating a voice  over like this or this for key targets can prove a very efficient way to get re-teaching of high frequency targets to students. They are very easy to make, particularly if you have electronic resources prepared – see TB if you are interested.

                                                             ii.Redo the same questions as practice – it can be beneficial (and easy to resource) for students to repeat questions that  they performed poorly on in the exam.

4)      Don’t assume that students have just ‘forgotten’ to perform in the way that they’ve been taught, or have simply not revised.

-  Usually, if students don’t  perform in the way we want, it’s because they have not have gained a secure understanding of the content or approach that we’ve taught.

- Because of this, more exam practice may not always be the best approach to therapy – if their understanding is not secure, therapy may need to take a step back and focus on the specific gaps.

- For example, if a students’ knowledge base of a topic is not secure, it may be better to use low-stakes knowledge quizzing as therapy, rather than relying on repeating the longer exam answers in which they have to apply their knowledge.

5)      Manage the message for students who’ve done badly

-                                               -  Getting mock results can be de-motivating for students who have done badly, and many will feel a sense of hopelessness /  shame. This can  be managed by:

o   Patience and kindness, even when we feel they didn’t prepare properly, and feel frustrated. A huge strength of our school is that we are slow to condemn students, and shy away from simplistic condemnation  of students as ‘lazy’.

o   Instead, we take a more nuanced understanding of  student motivation, staying positive and recognising that often, a surface lack of motivation masks deeper issues such as misunderstanding subject content, lack of confidence and insecurity. We talk to the students in these terms - directly and with candour when it's needed - but don't condemn or write-off.

o   Presenting mock scores as ‘number of marks off the higher grade’, so rather than ’15 / 40’, the mark is presented as ‘5 marks away from a D’, can be helpful in sustaining a positive and supportive  tone.

o   If we feel that we really can’t ‘get through’ to a  student in terms of their effort or motivation, don’t hesitate to call on support from leadership (FLs/ SLs/ YLs / SLT).