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Knowledge Organisers

Knowledge organisers are increasingly being used to support a knowledge rich curriculum in English primary and secondary schools. The knowledge requirements alone for GCSE and A level is challenging even before coming onto higher order levels of understanding and analysis on the Bloom's taxonomy. Knowledge organisers. Knowledge organisers help to support pupils in retaining and retrieving key information and help with long term retrieval through self-testing and low stakes testing in class. In themselves they are nothing fancy. Typically, they are a single page that contains key information about a topic. They contain keywords and definitions, key facts, bullet points, labelled diagrams and other essential knowledge. They do not have extended prose and no procedural knowledge and are designed in such a way that allow for self-testing.




Creating a knowledge organiser is one thing but it is how they are used is what makes them so powerful. I give out the knowledge organisers near the start of a topic. First, I will get the pupils to practice using knowledge organiser so that they can get familiar with them and know where to find specific information. I ask pupils questions based on the content of the knowledge organiser that has already been covered in lessons. Near the start of a topic, pupils will not have covered everything so we focus on a subset of the knowledge organiser. It is helpful if the knowledge organisers are further split into sections. In pairs the pupils quiz each other on a section of the knowledge organiser. At this stage they can look at the knowledge organiser. Pupils take it in turns with one asking the questions and the other answering. 




Of course, pupils need to be able to recall the information on the knowledge organiser from memory without looking at the knowledge organiser. Pupils need to be able to test themselves on the content. For homework or in class pupils can recall the content of a section of the knowledge organiser. Using revision support grids can help, but this exercise can also be done without. Pupils recall as much as they can covering one page in their exercise books. Then students can look at the knowledge organiser and copy down in a different colour pen the information that they could not remember. This helps students identify those areas they need to focus on learning better. In this way pupils are also learning an effective metacognition strategy that they can also use for revision independently.

In the following lesson, the starter might include a low stakes test with 5 questions pertaining to content on the knowledge organiser to recap the learning from the previous lesson and for homework. 

I have developed a set of knowledge organisers for A level and GCSE computer science that are freely available to download. They cover the complete AQA specification and they are fully editable allowing teachers to modify for other exam boards as needed. The knowledge organisers can be downloaded from:

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