One of the biggest challenges for learners in Cambridge IGCSE™ and O Level History is handling the sheer volume of information that they need to complete the course. There are several strategies that can help them categorise information, and commit it to long term memory, that you can show them in the classroom.
Knowledge Organisers
The simple premise of a knowledge organiser is to get all the information they need for a particular topic on one page. There are four categories of information that they can set up on a page:
A good knowledge organiser could be set out as a table or it could be a mind-map. The important thing is to try to distil the whole topic (such as the Korean War) into one page, to make revision easier. That might mean being selective – it’s a good thing for learners to understand that there is a core of essential information that they need to know, and a lot of other details that can be added if they master the basics first.
Retrieval Practice
Once the information has been selected and presented, it makes it easier to practise recall (or retrieval). I recommend the work done by Kate Jones (2020) on this, as she has produced a series of books on retrieval practice (and she’s also a history teacher, so you can rest assured that it works for this subject!).
Retrieval is about low-stakes testing to help learners remember what they have learned. There are many simple quizzing apps that you probably already use, and multiple-choice testing is also good if you think carefully about the questions. One good strategy is a retrieval practice grid, with a range of questions that cover knowledge that has been recently learned as well as content from further back. Award more marks for questions that go back further in time, so one mark for content from the last lesson and four marks for content from last term. That helps learners develop their long-term memory, which is a real challenge in a two-year course.
A very useful strategy is to get learners to develop their own questions for retrieval practice. Get them to use their knowledge organisers to create their own flashcards, and better yet get them to send you questions to create tests from. That trains them in targeting specific information and saves you time. I turned them into question cards for board games (I bought a few sets of Trivial Pursuits, which is a game of answering questions on various subjects, from charity shops and just used the class cards in place of the board game cards) and this was a great revision exercise.
Selecting Information in Assessment
Once learners have developed a comprehensive knowledge of all the information they need for the final exams, the challenge they face is selection. They can run out of time in the exam because they want to showcase everything that they know. Practise with them by setting up a past paper question and asking them to share all the relevant knowledge that they have. They have a class discussion about which pieces of information are best to use and why. I tell my students that knowledge in history needs to be accurate, relevant and precise. If it is incorrect, not pertinent to the question, or vague, then it isn’t useful. The best information passes these three tests, so use them as a filter.
Mindset and Memory
Finally, coaching learners through the course on how to handle information is really important. They will be daunted by just how much there is to learn, and note-taking can be time-consuming.
Make sure that they appreciate that this is a step-by-step process that they will get better at, and focus initially on the things they absolutely need to know. Pare things down to begin, and gradually increase the expectation on recall as you progress.
Revisit material periodically so that what is learned at the start of the course isn’t forgotten about for months on end, but mix up the retrieval to build long-term memory. I’ve seen so many teachers tell learners to keep up revision of older topics in the background, but they never have time for this. You need to lead the revision of that older material at regular intervals throughout the course.
Always remember not to overload your learners with masses of information, but break it into manageable chunks and keep up the little and often low-stakes assessment so that it gradually sinks in. This helps to build schematic knowledge, and therefore confidence, and helps to avoid last minute cramming that induces huge amounts of anxiety.
Robin Macpherson is a headteacher at Robert Gordon’s College in Scotland. He is also co-author of our new Cambridge IGCSE™ and O Level History series.
If you would like to get more support on a new Cambridge IGCSE™ and O Level History, explore the blog by John Etty on Teaching the Second World War depth study.
