We know as teachers (I was a teacher and exam marker), that content knowledge is crucial to exam success. However students also need to be able to interpret and understand the exam questions, and be able to allocate their time to answer different parts of the question, to maximise their marks. Exam questions can be dense, loaded with words and hard to interpret (often by design!). Investing some time in looking at exam questions together, using the ready-to-go worksheets and activities here, might pay dividends when it comes to exam time. 

Note: A couple of the handouts/worksheets linked below, reference the QCE (for students and teachers in Queensland). If you're in New South Wales, there is a HSC version of this article here. In any case you can adapt the activities for your context and align with the relevant syllabus as you need. These are based on activities I used with my students, with inspiration and ideas from colleagues.
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STEP 1: Question the question

Before approaching an exam style question, you can unpack and discuss the question verbally with the class:

• cognitive verb
• limiting terms
• content terms 
• mark allocation

Let students ask questions, dissect and deconstruct each of the above. This can be an open or closed book activity. Ideas can be recorded on whiteboards, flash cards, butchers paper or made as annotations. Deep and meaningful understanding is achieved by provocative questions, which promote inquiry and reflection, rather than simply dictating the answers. This takes time and can be self to self or self to peer, self to class. 

Some resources to help with this:

• Handout on writing for students:  to help students to visualise steps to success. 
• Sugar coat your cognitive verbs:  to help students to understand the nuances of verbs, plus this handy and fun student verb cheat sheet. 
• Graphic organisers:  to help students plan their responses.
• Word walls: to help students articulate their thoughts. 

Class activity

1. Project an Edrolo review or past external exam question on the board. 
2. Highlight the cognitive verb and the mark allocation. Discuss as a class what students think they need to do. 
3. Highlight the limiting terms: they state what other things need to be done in the question (e.g. refer to a source or quote). Qualifying terms often have hidden meanings – for example, “explain” is very different to “explain the importance” because “importance” implies some level of analysis (cause and effect, achieving goals etc). 
4. Highlight the content term. 
   
   

Example A
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Tip: Students can remember the 3 categories of key terms as CLC:

• Cognitive verb
• Limiting term
• Content term

STEP 2: Plan and write a response 

1. Use a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) to see and set a clear success criteria.
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2. Edrolo’s Review questions have pre-written WAGOLLS mapped to a checklist for success. These can be projected onto the board and used to backwards map from. 
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3. Colour coding can be done based on the school writing structure e.g. TEE, SEE, PEEL, TEEL, IDEAL as a class or independently.  

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4. Use the graphic organiser to get students to plan their thoughts down based on their own learnings, notes from class  and the WAGOLLS. 
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5. Students can then write their responses with the WAGOLL accessible, hidden, or particularly accessible. The word wall can be helpful in this process.

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