Fareham College

Background

Fareham College is a large general further education college situated on the south coast of Hampshire. Students at the college achieve better GCSE results than the national and county average and a large majority continue into higher education. Juliane Collings, Maths Lecturer, explains how they use the free Access to Scripts service from Pearson to help inform teaching to identify gaps in students’ knowledge and to motivate students to embrace their achievements.

Scripts enable our students to see how they performed

As a college, we use the Access to Scripts service a lot. Many of our students are curious and want to see their scripts. Once they get over the initial shock of seeing their own script, they tend to embrace them. They know their grades already and sometimes they are pleasantly surprised by how high they scored because they expected their marks to be lower. The students tend to want to see how they did and how they can improve. Their heads are filled with so much information that they are often unsure of what they can and cannot do. The script gives them the reassurance that ‘wow, I’m actually quite good at that’ but it also highlights particular area they need to focus on to address the gaps. I have never had a student who has been upset or demotivated after seeing their script because ultimately, it gives them reassurance in terms of what they are good at, as this is the message we convey when issuing the papers to them.

We encourage students to look at scripts as an opportunity to achieve their goals 

Having access to students’ scripts is a good starting point at the beginning of the year. We have quite a broad range of GCSE students so the first scripts we try to obtain are for those students who have narrowly missed their Grade 4 and therefore, are potential resit candidates. This enables us to identify where they have lost marks, and allows us to focus on these areas in the first instance.

I use the scripts a lot and share them with the students who are generally quite inquisitive. They want to see where they have lost marks, and a lot of the time they are quite surprised to see some of the marks they did get, because they were convinced they would not score well in that particular area.

The students who tend to be in the higher bracket and have narrowly missed their Grade 4, can be a bit critical when they see for themselves how easily they could have scored additional marks to get them to Grade 4.

Those students at the lower end of the scale tend to be quite disappointed at first, especially if they think they still have gaps in areas they thought they would have scored well in. However, I try and turn this around so they can look at this as an opportunity on where they did well and how we can build on areas where they need more support. This approach really works and they tend to come around. Many students take the scripts away and have a good look. Those with private tutors will use them to get additional help on areas where they have scored fewer marks.

Access to Scripts and ResultsPlus give teachers the full picture

We also use ResultsPlus from Pearson which is a great tool, it gives us a clear breakdown of where students are strong and the areas for improvement. Building further on this information, we do our own diagnostics which helps us identify students who did well in the exam, but not in the diagnostics. If a particular student scored really well in a specific area in the exam, but not so well in the diagnostic then they may need more support in that area or a little refresher. We can then identify areas they need to work on and put together an Individual Learning Plan for that student.

Access to Scripts gives us insights to further support our students

Access to Scripts is a huge benefit all around. In the first instance, and in some cases later on in the year, misconceptions and mistakes are highlighted and we can see these were not necessarily picked up at college. It’s something that has followed them from school which is really interesting.

Conversely, we have several feeder schools and some of them may teach something completely differently to us, or approach a problem in a different way. If I come across an approach that is really interesting, and they got it right in the exam, then I will adopt that method if I feel it will work well for the students.

We also like to use students’ answers as examples – if they have made a minute mistake then we may use this as an example, without disclosing who the student is, for other students to look at and analyse. It helps our teaching because these examples are new and relevant and most importantly, they are not written by teachers. We do something quite similar with their own scripts. For example, I ask them to look at their scripts and focus on a particular question and we will look at where they could improve and where they could make minor adjustments to get the correct answer. I would always encourage students to look at the question and their answer on their own first, try and solve the problem and figure out where they may have gone wrong by themselves. It supports their reasoning skills and support their learning and critical thinking as well as independence.

The outcome – scripts motivate students by showing what they are capable of

Having access to students’ real scripts enables the teaching staff to not simply focus on mistakes and weaknesses, but also showing students what they are capable of. The first thing scripts enable us to do is set targets and then we look at tracking i.e. areas where they are strong and areas that require improvement. However, motivation is the biggest thing for me and I see it as a great motivational tool.