How to learn keywords & quotations – weekly retrieval

I’ve blogged before about how we have tested students on keywords. It forms part of their 3 set homeworks to learn the keywords. However we realise we need students to equally be able to recall and apply quotations in their writing.

We have therefore adapted our weekly quizzing to use one of the them to help learn relevant quotations.

Week A – They have to retrieve the 10 set keywords for the current topic (given to them on sheets for homework). They peer mark.

Week B – They used to have 10 random, interleaved prior topic keywords. We’re now changing to 5 keywords only and then 5 quotations. They will peer mark these too. The benefit of this is that they will see others students’ quotes and it saves me from marking.

Students will be told a topic and sometimes a religion and they have to recall a quotation that could support a view (either ‘for’ or ‘against’). They will need to recall an appropriate quote (not word for word – paraphrasing is fine) and where it’s from. We’re not getting students to learn specific references. We are getting them to remember the source e.g The Bible, The Qur’an, Hadith etc

At the same time we have reduced  and simplified the keywords as we originally included all given by the exam board but realised they’re not all necessary to be learnt in this way.

We’ve also created HW booklets for the quotations (from these HERE from AQA )to go with the key word booklets. We have attempted to keep these to a minimum ( possibly not successfully!), reusing quotes where possible so they can remember one and apply over several topics.

We will also give them index cards to help with their own retrieval practice. They can write a quotation on one side and the topic/s that it can be applied to on the other so they are useful to be used both ways round.

We’ve also started to add more quotations into the multiple choice online quizzes they do for another homework. We really hope this will help them to learn the quotations over the 3 years.