Exam Technique

Posted by Shaun Drury on Wednesday 05th of March 2008 in Education & Revision Help

You would not expect a professional footballer to be any good at his job if he doesn’t train, nor would you expect a professional golfer to win a tournament if he hadn’t played the course a couple of times. So why is it then that most parents expect their children to do well in an exam if they haven’t had any practice, or haven’t been taught how to answer the questions in the exam?

The best way to prepare for the exam is to do practice exam questions. There is no excuse for not doing this because there is an abundance of questions to work from. Many practice papers can be bought in your local retailer and some can be found for free on the internet, have a look around and see what you can find. They say practice makes perfect, and that is especially true for the 11+.

If your child keeps making mistakes, don’t just correct them by telling them the answer, you need to find out exactly what thought processes they went through to get the answer. If you yourself know why your child is getting the wrong answer, you can then help to change their thought process into getting the correct answer. If you know their exact thought pattern you can see at exactly what point they went wrong, praise them for what they did correctly, then just nudge them along the right path where they went wrong. Immediately after you have done this go through an example with them so that they can see how the new techniques are used in real questions.
Keep reminding them that if they do get stuck in the exam, move onto the next question. There is no point wasting time trying to work out a hard question, which is worth just as many marks as an easy question. If they have time at the end, they can then go back and try to work out the answer.

One last thing to remember is to make sure your child knows how to fill in the answer sheet, if they leave out a question they need to make sure that all subsequent answers are filled in correctly, so that the question numbers match up to where they fill in the answers.

By Richard Coleman, Teaching Assistant