USE SMART ADVANCE FOR REVISION
Exam-style questions
There is no substitute for revising with real exam-style questions.
Using past-papers to practice answering exam questions is a critical part of the revision process. However, students quickly exhaust the available material from exam board websites.
Smart Advance provides students with hundreds of new, unseen exam-style questions written or reviewed by examiners.
But exams are cancelled for 2021?!
Smart Revise is still great for preparing for mock exams.
Schools and colleges will be setting internal mock exams or possibly external tests* in 2021 to help determine centre assessed grades, and we cannot forget about the students in years 10 and 12 who will benefit from this new feature too.
Smart Revise is an excellent course companion. Helping students secure their knowledge and prepare for assessments.
*Awaiting the outcome of The Department for Education & Ofqual consultation.
Guided marking
Marking is not automatic with Smart Advance. Students are guided through the marking process.
Unique to Smart Revise, students can choose from two methods of marking their answers. Guided and unguided marking. Unguided shows the mark scheme to students and allows them to enter the number of marks awarded. Guided marking steps a student through a series of simple yes/no questions to help them judge their answer, automatically adding up the marks gained.
Smart Advance does not automatically mark a student's answer. It is an important, and rich part of the revision process that students reflect on their answers for themselves instead of the computer doing it for them. Engaging with the mark scheme allows students to understand how examiners award credit for their answers.
Command words and level of response marking frameworks included
Smart Advance uses real JCQ and exam board command words.
"State", "describe", "explain" and "justify" are just a few of what are known as command words. Students need to be able to identify the command words in a question so that they know the type of written response an examiner is looking for.
Smart Advance can identify and explain what the command words are in a question to a student if they choose this option.
In addition, "level of response" questions are marked in bands. Smart Advance provides for these types of questions and helps students assess how many marks their answer is worth.
USE SMART ADVANCE FOR ASSESSMENT
Assess understanding
End of topic tests or exam-practice.
All topics can be individually locked and unlocked to students. This enables you to keep hidden a bank of questions that students have not seen. By unlocking selected topics, asking students to complete the questions in class and locking them again afterwards, a teacher can create reliable assessments.
Unlock a single topic to conduct an end of topic test, or unlock multiple topics to create an exam experience.
Insightful reports
Review student answers, marking and progress.
A suite of reports enables teachers to review the answers students are writing to questions and also assess how well they are interpreting and applying the mark scheme.
Discover if students need more practice with particular command words such as, "justify" or "level of response" type questions, or whether they are struggling to answer fully the questions worth higher marks.
USE SMART ADVANCE FOR INTERVENTION
Identify the questions students are struggling with
Select individual questions to go over in class.
Using the reports it is easy to see which questions students need the most help with. Every question has a unique number with an option to navigate immediately to a particular question.
Identify the individual bullet points in a mark scheme that students didn't use when awarding themselves marks
Teacher can reflect, "did I teach that?", "why didn't students include that in their answers?", "why is that the most popular answer?"
A student responses report allows the teacher to look at the answers students give to a question. More interestingly, it also shows from all the possible answers that can gain credit, which ones the students did or didn't use.
If a possible answer wasn't used, does that mean that it wasn't taught? Does it mean that the students didn't remember that as a possibility? Or simply that the students chose other answers instead? Taking a deeper look at the analysis of the collective responses and application of the mark scheme is extremely powerful for teachers, and is unique to Smart Revise.
USE SMART ADVANCE FOR PERSONALISED LEARNING
Ideal for exam preparation
A bank of exam-style questions for every topic.
Every topic in Smart Revise can be controlled by the teacher or if the teacher chooses, by a student themselves. At the end of the course, teachers can enable all topics so that students can use Smart Advance as a bank of exam-style practice questions.
CASE STUDY
A teacher keeps Smart Advance locked for students while they are learning a new topic. When the topic is complete, in a subsequent lesson the teacher selects the topic that has been taught and enables Smart Advance. In the lesson students attempt the questions from the topic and mark their own work reducing the workload for their teacher, while gaining an insight into how mark schemes are applied.
At the end of the lesson the teacher locks Smart Advance so that students cannot retry the questions and change their marks outside of the lesson. They use reports to identify the weakest students in the class for further intervention together with the questions that were least well answered by the class. The teacher goes over these questions and the answers with the whole class in a future lesson.
At the end of the course the teacher unlocks Smart Advance and all the topics, releasing a huge bank of exam-style questions to the students who can selectively pick questions to tackle again for revision. With guided marking the student is walked through the marking process immediately which means the teacher does not need to mark practice papers for students.