Senior School exam parent teacher interviews finished last night, which means Seniors will all be able to receive their exam papers back. What do you do with them once you get them back? Firstly, you need to read through any comments from your teachers. Ask your teachers for any additional feedback or clarification of their comments if you need to. Then comes the most important step - re-doing the exam paper. Have another go at your exam paper making the improvements that your teacher has recommended. Maybe there were some things you couldn't remember as you were sitting the exam the first time? Check back on your notes and then add in that extra detail. Then hand your exam in again and ask your teacher to mark it to see if you have improved. If necessary, re-work it a third time if you need to to get the grades you want.
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Many of you already use OneNote a lot for your school work. Here's a way to make OneNote even more useful. If you go to this website then you can download some add ons to your OneNote. This works no problems for windows, but for those of you with Mac computers it might not be possible.
Once you have the add ons downloaded you will see that you have an extra tab on the end of your top bar menu called 'Learning Tools'. Here you can click on 'immersive reader'. With immersive reader you can have your own notes or the material written by your teacher read out loud to you. You can also select 'dictate' and then speak out loud and OneNote with write your spoken words down for you. Give it a try! When handing in written work for assessments, it's essential that you allow time to edit your work. One of the most efficient ways of editing your work is to hear it read out loud.
When you have someone else reading your work you notice things that you might not have noticed if you read it on screen or paper. For example you will hear if your sentences are too long, if your ideas need to link more clearly to each other, or if you have used an incorrect word that is spelled similar to the one you intended to use. Ideally, you should sit next to the person reading your work to you, and edit on your laptop as they are reading. If you don't have the opportunity to have your work read aloud by someone else, reading it aloud yourself may also help. Ask your teacher to be able to move your seat out in the hallway so you can do this if necessary. Here are some top tips for exam study for those of you with exams coming up over the next few weeks:
School practice examinations are not that far away. Commercially available study guides can be really useful to help support your study. They have a wealth of practice questions/tasks for you to work through, and they have extra notes and ideas for how to tackle tasks that complement what you have learned in class. Look for them in bookshops.
Have your grades plateaued? Are you wanting to improve your grades? Have you mastered something in your subject are are looking for the next step to take your learning further?
One thing that can make a real difference in every subject is increasing your general knowledge. Students who can draw on their knowledge about the world and connect it to and apply it to their work in class learn faster, and get higher grades. So sometimes working on your learning outside of classroom can be the best thing you can do to improve your work inside the classroom. Some ways you can improve your general knowledge are:
Students - teachers work really hard to give you detailed information about what is expected of you for an individual piece of assessment. When you first get this information, it can be daunting. Especially if you have difficulties with reading or processing. It's great to get teacher help to unpack the instructions with you.
But in addition to this there is another strategy you can use. The strategy is to check the instructions at least six times. Rather than just using your assessment information instructions at the beginning of the task, commit to checking in with it at least six times while you are working on the task. The first one to three times you go through the information your aim is to check through the details on what is expected of you, and make sure you understand what you have to do, asking questions where you are not sure. The second three times you go through the information your aim is to check that the work you are doing meets the requirements. For example, perhaps you have been instructed to include a table, and you realise you haven't done this. Or maybe you have been asked to include a bibliography and you have forgotten to keep note of your source references. Realising this early in the process is much better than trying to pull together a bibliography in the last five minutes before hand in. And often bibliographies can have a big impact on grades. So - next time you get instructions for a piece of assessment. Hold onto it carefully, and keep looking back at it! Sometimes it's hard to know where to begin with an essay. One approach is to use sticky notes to help you. You take a whole bunch of sticky notes, and you write one idea you have on each sticky note. Your ideas could include facts, or examples, or your own thoughts, or definitions. Once you have done this, you can work on grouping your sticky notes together in ways that seem sensible. Maybe you match one example with an idea? Maybe you match one definition with a fact you want to put in your introduction? Then you can put your groups of sticky notes in a logical order. Once you have your sticky notes grouped, then you can think about starting to write using your sticky notes to guide you. This technique is particularly useful if you find you are a slow writer, or you get feedback on your essays to say that they need to be better organised. It can be really useful to get all your ideas out of your head first, before trying to tackle the writing task. Give it a go!
Still struggling with formatting a bibliography correctly? Here is a link to a style guide that tells you in detail how different resources need to cited. You can also set up an account which will help format a bibliography for you. It's free for 3 days. This could be especially useful for you if you are writing a substantial report for example, a Humanities research assignment or an Extended Essay for IB.
Many students look up articles in Wikipedia as part of their research. Ideally, websites that cannot be edited by all members of the public are better to use. However, sometimes this is unavoidable, and it's better to reference your work than not at all. To make it easier to reference a Wikipedia page you can scroll down the long menu on the left hand side of the article you have used until you find where it says 'cite this page'. You can then cut and paste the reference and include that in your bibliography.
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