Business and economics curriculum - writing and assessing contextual answers
28 September 2020
Hints and Tips - 5 minute read
Matt Dilley, OCR Subject Advisor
So far we have seen the need for contextual writing and hopefully seen how contextual teaching and learning can be incorporated into our classrooms. The final and possibly most important stage in the process is getting students to write coherently and contextually, as well as assessing their work accurately.
For some students the ability to write contextually is a natural and normal process, for others it seems like an entirely foreign language. Teachers need to offer many opportunities for students to write and be assessed in a contextual way.
Candidate answers
A good starting point is to use past exam paper questions and use past candidate answers with examiners commentary added in.
I have included a link to answers from the 2019 Business Studies A Level exam available on Interchange (to access the answers an interchange account is required, with the help of your exams officer).
Scroll down to question 9 to see two entirely different answers with one scoring 3 marks and the other scoring 9.
Firstly students will need to have read the source material on Hotel Chocolat - click on June 2019 – past papers – H423-02 resource booklet. You could set this as pre reading or as a starter task. Then set about getting them started with one or more of these five ideas:
- Depending on where you feel your learners are at in their progress you could now ask them to answer Q9 before they see the exemplar work.
- Give students copies of the two answers get them to grade them using the mark scheme - you will need hide the examiner commentary and the grades awarded. (I would be willing to bet that the majority of students would mark the longer answer as a higher grade than the shorter one).
- Get your students to highlight and count how many times each candidate references the case material. This can facilitate a discussion about what it means to be contextual. Remember being contextual isn’t simply the ability to copy facts from one place to another, but it is necessary to show students how often and how to use the source material in their answers.
- Complete some peer assessment on students’ own answers, again look at the content and amount of contextualised information included in their answers.
- Give students the answer that scored 3 marks - they could cut out sentences they would like to keep and discard any others, but they need to make it up to a 9 mark answer.
As you can see there are many practical ways to use this resource, and I’m sure there are many more which are used in classes every day. Share your ideas in the comment below, they could really help to support your fellow teachers.
Assessment
The final section is to help support you in assessing student work correctly, in order to this you will need to understand the marks scheme (June 2019 – mark schemes – H431-02).
One part of the mark scheme which isn’t always used is found on page 5. Level descriptors can support you in identifying which mark band learners work should be placed in. To be in the strong category for knowledge, understanding and application, contextualising answers is vital.
Page 12 contains the mark scheme for the question previously mentioned, the words strong, good and limited are referred to in the document. These relate back to the level descriptors I previously wrote about.
Applying a best fit model will support you in identifying which mark band each piece of work falls into. It’s worth noting that there is a maximum mark of 2 for any answer that is not contextualised.
On the right-hand side of the mark scheme there are three contextualisation ideas which could be included in student answers, remember this is for guidance and any relevant contextualisation could be used in an answer.
To conclude
This completes the series and I hope that you have enjoyed reading my posts and can appreciate how important contextualisation in business studies and economics is. I also hope that there are some ideas that you can use in your classroom too.
Please comment below or get in touch with us if there is anything you feel you can add on this topic, or if you used or adapted any of the ideas shared let us know how they worked for you.
Stay connected
As always, we are here to support you and your students. If you have questions you can email economics@ocr.org.uk or send your tweets @OCR_BusEcon where I share resources and articles.
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About the author
Matt Dilley - Subject Advisor
Matt joined OCR in April 2020 as part of the Business and Economics advisory team. He has a degree in Accountancy with a focus on Financial Accounting. His work experience includes commercial banking and 12 years as a teacher of Business Studies and Economics where he was a faculty lead. Outside of work Matt is a keen cyclist and supports the mighty Aston Villa.
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