How to mentally prepare students for the exam

We have become more and more aware of the needs of a certain group of students. Up until now we have both concentrated on exam technique as a way of preparing students with an arsenal for tackling the exam. The rest of this section will give you plenty of ideas about how this can be done and why it is so vital. However, in 2007 we taught a group of students who could by the end of May quote evry technique back without a moments hestitation - they understood the need to create multi-part answers and to explain fully, they knew that not all the content required was visible in the question (see the page on watch out for icebergs) and how to combat this. And yet, they still under-performed in their mock exams by a significant margin.

After careful analysis of the papers we discovered a worrying trend. Several students had attempted the first couple of questions and no more, or had not even put pen to paper. Some might put this down to a lack of revision and the apathy that mock exams can create. But we strongly believe that there are deeper issues involved.

After student voice sessions with those students affected we came to realise that they were missing one crucial technique: they did not know how to think their way through an exam. They knew how to tackle individual questions, but not how to solve issues as they arose. Faced with this seemingly insummountable problem, they simply gave up and did nothing more.

We ran a series of sessions for these students to help them to learn to cope with the exam situation. These went as follows:

• Word Trees - students start with a key word in the question and think of two words that are associated with it. Each of those words is then taken on and two new words are made from them. This continues until they have run out of words. The purpose of this is to show students that a little bit of thinking can give them a whole vocabulary to use.

• TASC Wheel - this is an eight part process designed to help students work through issues. Although it is meant for group activity, we felt it had an impact as students were able to attach their situation to a programme and work through it.

• Three panel vision - we gave each student three pieces of paper and got them to condense content, techniques and problem-solving skills so that they each occupied a piece. We then got them to place the panels in front of them so they were staring striaght at them amd got them to memorise the panels. They then helped test each other. We then took them to the exam hall and asked them to visualise the panels. This produced a great resopnse in students.

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