1. Key Word Intervention with Year 11
Andy Gosnell
Wood Green School
Mathematics

2. Intention…
To improve students keyword knowledge so that on exams they were able to access more questions
I believe they were held back previously due to not understanding the language of a maths GCSE paper
Following from the students completing a full mock exam in July I chose 5 questions that I believed the students could have done better in purely from improving their knowledge of the language used

3. Intervention… I chose to work on just the keywords
There was no teaching between their mock paper and the end of the intervention earlier this week on any of the topics involved
The only thing I worked on with the group was 4 key words:
Fair
Prime Number
Factor
Ratio

4. How did I intervene…
To work on the keywords I used a variety of methods:
I used games using the keyword sheets I have in my classroom, including:
I chose a particular page and asked them to memorise as many as possible in 5 minutes
They then competed in a “definition off” against the other side of the class
I asked them to find 5 red words on any sheet and learn them
They got 5 minutes to learn a page of definitions in pairs and then competed in a “definition off”
I used homework to learn the definitions of the keywords
These were followed up by tests to measure their recall and ability to give a practical example of each

5. Examples using the definition sheets…

6. Examples of the definition sheets…

7. Assessment…
To assess the students they answered the same 5 questions on 3 separate occasions
June – Mock paper
September – first lesson after summer holiday
October – After interventions
Crucially between the September and October tests the students were not given any indication of how they did in September. They got both results back having completed the October test
They did receive feedback back to the mock papers, but this was before the summer holidays and was within 3 full 80 marks GCSE papers

8. Test…

9. Results… The results were encouraging:
Original Mock
September - Before Key Word Intervention
October - After Key Word Intervention
Out of: 9
Ryisa 6 8
Lauren 7 5
Finn
Chloe 1 3 4
John
Joanne
Ben
Josh
Brandon 2
Isabella
Max
Georgia
Olivia
The results were encouraging:
Out of the 15 students to take part 9 students improved their score from the original mock paper to the October final test
4 scored the same mark
2 got worse (both are quite disaffected students)

10. Future implications…
There are certainly benefits to using tasks to improve students keyword knowledge
No teaching was conducted on the topics involved during the intervention and in 9 out of 15 students there was improvement
If teaching was conducted as well then it could be assumed that students would have improved further
Look for particular topics where keywords are crucial to students accessing questions on exam papers – particularly on the new GCSE exams
Continue to develop different methods of introducing keyword development in my lessons – KS3 as well as examination groups