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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