Skip to main content

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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mango Learning

We are a community of teachers that have developed extensive computing resources primarily aimed at the English secondary school curriculum that can be accessed here: www.mangolearning.academy .  Mango learning empowers teachers to deliver great lessons that explain complex ideas using clear and highly scaffolded teaching and learning resources. We are very excited to offer these resources for free to the community. These teaching and learning resources for computing are made by teachers for teachers and we understand the day-to-day challenges that teacher face.   The resources incorporate general and computing specific evidence-based pedagogy. We incorporated spaced retrieval practice though knowledge organisers, diagnostic questions and quizzes, for instance. We also incorporate ideas from cognitive load theory through lots of worked examples.   To help with coding we use PRIMM and block to text based pedagogical approaches.   To support literacy we address ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Teaching Children to Read Code using Evidence-based Approaches

Before students can write code, they need to be able to read code. Computer science pedagogy is often based around the ideas of Piaget’s constructivism - where pupils develop their knowledge through exploration, and Papert’s constructionism - where pupils learn through creating artifacts. However, evidence has shown that learners need guidance to gain useful knowledge efficiently and to organise that knowledge in a clear and logical way. They need to be able to break a problem down, remove the unnecessary detail, find patterns and think algorithmically before they can start to write programs for solving problems. Just as we wouldn’t expect a young child to write prose before they can read, we need to provide guided approaches that use direct instruction and scaffolding to help our students read code before they can be expected to write code themselves. These guided approaches are needed just as much as, if not more than, creative discovery activities. Explain the code My first approach...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to support your students to write code

For many children writing code can be a daunting prospect. To help children learn to write code more easily we can use a range of scaffolded pedagogies. Initially these approaches take ownership of the code away from the students thereby giving them confidence to explore and experiment with the code.   Gradually as the students learn more and more we can reduce the amount of support until they are able to write their own programs independently.   In a previous article we looked at approaches for supporting pupils to learn to read code that included activities such as explaining, predicting and tracing code, and live demonstrations with worked examples. This follow up article presents some approaches to support pupils with writing code. Fixing broken code Children can find and fix common syntax, runtime and logical errors in a piece of code. Errors might include missing brackets, missing speech marks, spelling mistakes and missing variables declarations, for instance. Th...
Post a Comment
Read more