A-level Biology Essay Teacher Guide Paper 3, Exams of Biology

Download A-level Biology Essay Teacher Guide Paper 3 and more Exams Biology in PDF only on Docsity! This resource is designed to help you to plan your teaching to prepare students for the essay in A-level Paper 3. It has been designed for a number of teachers in the same department to work together, but could be adapted for single teachers, or for use with students. Throughout the development of our new A-level Biology specification, we spoke to teachers and university experts. We were told that extended writing was an important skill that students should be developing. The 25 mark essay has been an element of our A-levels for many years, going back several specifications. It is at its heart a synoptic essay. Students who write in detail on one single area will not gain high marks. They must instead demonstrate their ability to draw together concepts from throughout the course and relate them to the title given. At first, you can worry that this is difficult for your students and will mean a large amount of marking. In many ways, essays are a much more positive way of assessing than other forms of question that cover large areas of the specification. As there are two titles, students can pick the one that bests fits their knowledge of Biology and show what they know. The Biology essay produces a very satisfactory range of marks from all candidates, showing that it allows candidates of all abilities to demonstrate their knowledge. The graph below shows the spread of marks for all candidates in the Biology essay in 2014. As would be expected, it is difficult, but not impossible, to gain full or almost full marks in the essay. What is perhaps even more reassuring is that very few students gain little or no marks. This shows how even the weakest candidates can gain marks by writing something on the essay and shows that it is worth putting time into preparation of all students. Teacher guide elements Teacher guide to A-level essay contains four elements:  A training schedule – showing how a CPD session could be run with teachers  A presentation – covering the major points of the essay  A set of past paper essay titles and the indicative content from the mark schemes  A set of essays that have previously been marked. Changes to mark scheme The mark scheme for the Biology essay is changing. Previously, it included several elements. Each essay was separately marked on four areas: quality of written communication (QWC), breadth, content and relevance. The new specification uses a ‘level of response’ mark scheme which combines all four of these areas into one set of marking guidelines. Comments on the previously marked questions relate to the previous mark scheme. With a slightly different mark scheme, it is likely that there would be slight changes to the marks given to any given essay, so the marks shown should be seen as indicative only. Training schedule 1. Work through slide two of the presentation. 2. Hand out copies of the titles from essays for the last few years. Do not give out the indicative content yet.  Are the titles what you would expect?  Are there titles that you would immediately identify as easier to answer than others? 3. Read through slide three. 4. Choose a couple of essay titles from the last few years. Work together to list the topics from the specification that could be included in an essay relating to this title. 5. Hand out the indicative content for each essay title. Compare the list of titles that you produce with the indicative content list for those topics. You will see that: a. titles are broad, so can cover many aspects, b. the topics in the indicative content are what they would expect. 6. Read through the mark scheme on slides four – six of the presentation. Things to note: