Knowledge Organisers

GCSEs and vocational courses are becoming increasingly challenging. Most subjects have lost their controlled assessments (previously known as coursework) and these have been replaced with additional exam papers. The focus of these exams is the retrieval and application of knowledge. This puts increasing pressure on students to know and retain even more information for longer.

Typically, most youngsters leave their revision until a few weeks (best case scenario) or days/hours (worst case scenario) before the examinations and tests. This presents a problem. Our short-term memory is designed to be just that, short-term, and has limited capacity. Students find themselves unable to retain the information, they become stressed and often give up, convincing themselves they are no good at revising or that they “can’t do subject ‘x’”.

The secret to success is to regularly revisit the knowledge to be learned. This helps transfer the knowledge from the short-term memory to the long-term memory. This not only helps to make ‘learning stick’ but it also frees up our short-term memory for day-to-day learning and experiences.

Knowledge organisers will be made available at the start of each half term to help students remember what they’re learning and to help them to see the bigger learning journey in their subjects. Instead of forgetting previous learning, students continually revisit and retrieve prior learning from their memories.

Many of you ask us how you can help to support your children at home. Some of you are worried that you don’t have all of the subject specific knowledge to be able to help your children. Some of you worry how to check that your children have done their work and revision. The knowledge organisers will help you to do this easily.

Every half-term students will be given a new knowledge organiser pack. Links to the packs can be found by clicking here.

Students will be taught about the different ways in which they can study – this will largely be done through tutor session and in lessons.

Students can use their Knowledge Organisers in a number of different ways but should not just copy from the Knowledge Organiser into their book.

• Ask someone to write questions for them
• Write their own challenging questions and then leave it overnight to answer them the next day
• Create mindmaps
• Create flashcards
• Put the key words into new sentences
• Look, cover, write and check
• Mnemonics
• Draw a comic strip of a timeline
• Use the ‘clock’ template to divide the information into smaller sections. Then test themselves on different sections
• Give themselves spelling tests
• Definition tests
• Draw diagrams of processes
• Draw images and annotate/label them with extra information
• Do further research on the topic
• Create fact files
• Create flowcharts