Many Economics students in year 12 can struggle to grasp the basic concepts and theories as it is often a new subject for them, having never had the opportunity to study the subject previously at GCSE. It can be overwhelming to hear lots of new concepts and theories, along with having to draw and adapt many diagrams. This can be a real barrier for students, particularly in year 12.

Making a positive start

To help with this, students may find it useful to stay organised and revise early on.

Even if you do not have an assessment coming up it is always good practice to revise and consolidate your notes and learning from previous lessons and topics, or even ahead of lessons in a ‘flipped’ learning style. This may help you understand the content within your next lesson more easily.

Flipped learning

This is the idea of trying to ‘learn’ and become familiar with key terms and topics before your teacher goes through it in class. This can help students understand the main building blocks and allow you to challenge yourself more during the actual lesson and deepen your understanding further through classroom led discussions.

This can be done in various ways:

• Reading a chapter ahead in a set text
• Finding news articles related to your current topics
• Current mind maps and ‘blurting’
• Watching a revision clip from the famous Youtuber – Econplusdal.

All of this can help to build your confidence and engagement not only within the lessons to help provide a solid foundation of good practice, but it is particularly useful to help build routine for independent learning. This becomes even more vital during further education such as a University degree and the exam season.

Confidence

The main idea of year 12 is to help build your confidence within the subject and help you to become familiar with using key terms and theory within your verbal responses and written responses when answering examination questions – this can help you to hit the exam codes of knowledge, application, analysis and evaluation.

Speak to your teacher

Speaking to your teacher and finding out their point of view or gaining their advice on why you may be struggling would also be a recommended strategy.

Having those conversations early on can help to reassure you that you may actually know more than you think and that progress really isn’t ‘that’ bad at the moment. Your teacher may be able to provide you with extra materials in class to help practice certain parts of the specification or exam technique to help you settle into the course during the early stages.

Your teacher may even run regular support sessions to go through theory and eventually exam technique when enough content has been covered. This can be a great way to work with other students of a similar ability who may be in different classes but also struggling with the same things as yourself. Revising in groups and with friends also helps to make it more sociable and gives you’re the opportunity to test each other.

Mind maps

To help you with the content, students often find creating mind Maps and blurting a useful technique as shown in the images from some past students. This is a great way to brainstorm your knowledge of particular areas of the specification and see where any gaps may exist in your subject knowledge.

These can then act as a building block of knowledge to aid you when answering examination-based questions as at the end of the day the questions are based around the specification and content of the course.

As a result, trying to revise definitions and practice drawing diagrams on a regular basis can help consolidate this knowledge and give a great foundation to build upon.

A tip with these mind maps is to keep building an expanding the ‘legs’ or ‘arms’ of them, this can really help you to develop and promote your analytical skill set of trying to think about the knock on impacts or effects within Economics.

 

Understanding examination questions

Students often struggle with the level of depth required in A Level question responses and often remark about the jump up from GCSE to A-level.

There is certainly a requirement to show a lot more depth and knowledge of key terms and theory in Economics. The longer questions and ‘essays’ that we come across at A level tend to be far more open and allow students to develop a range of skills such as; justification and the idea of being able to debate a view point.

To help overcome this it is vital for students studying Economics to understand what the exam questions and examiners are actually looking for.

Exam Question practise

Very useful exercises include going through mark schemes and examiner reports to see ‘model’ answers with suggested structures and layouts of questions. A model answer could even be an answer that has scored poorly as this can help you understand common pitfalls from previous examination students.

Chain of reasoning

This could be seen in various ways such as; incorrect knowledge shown, inaccurate drawing and adapting of diagrams or common situations where students have failed to develop their chain of reasoning.

This is one of the most common pitfalls and reasons that students score lower marks in longer type questions within Economics. One of the most important skills to develop throughout your course of study is the ability to develop your ideas and analysis.

Key Terms

It is important to remember that all of the key terms you learn during your studies can and should be used where appropriate to help develop your thought process and provide clear links or ‘knock on’ effects, such as the potential impacts on an economy of loosening monetary policy.

It is your job as an Economics student to take the examiner through the implications of such a policy change in a step by step approach This also helps to show your precise knowledge of the specification and secure A01 marks.

Command words

Define, explain, examine, assess and evaluate – these are all common command words we would expect to see at the start of questions within Economic papers. Each command word is a big clue on what you should be aiming to do, or not do, during your response.

Explain

Far too often, students write too much for a response when it is not needed – such as ‘explain’.

This command word often means no evaluation is needed, yet a common examiner remark in these types of questions is that students waste too much time in the exam by overwriting to try and ‘guarantee’ marks.

This is bad practice as not only is it not contributing to marks in the question, but it would also waste vital time in the exam that you could be using on other questions where more skills such as evaluation are actually needed!

Past Papers & Mark Schemes

It is a good strategy to read through past exam papers and mark schemes to understand what the questions are actually asking and expecting of students.

Try planning out questions and thinking ‘What would I write’ before comparing to the mark scheme or model answers from the exam board website where possible.

If you are struggling with a particular question and have a habit of writing too much and overcomplicating your answers a good affirmation can be ‘keep things simple’. Show your knowledge, link this knowledge to the case study material that you are often provided with and develop your analysis of the Economics to explain the knock-on effects.

Overall

The command words and questions can take time to get to grips with, especially if this is a new subject for you. Economic teachers often remark that year 12 is like a jigsaw. At first you are presented with many pieces, but you have no idea what the picture is that you are trying to build.

It can take many topics and time for you to collect enough jigsaw pieces, but overtime as you start to piece more and more of them together the picture becomes clearer.

Economics is a very synoptic subject, meaning a lot of it is all linked. Therefore, once you have covered more topics and covered a greater part of the specification, you will be better placed to draw upon this expansive pool of knowledge and theory that you have built up to help construct answers of a higher standard.