Best Practice

How teachers can use mock exam results to boost student progress

GCSEs and A Levels Revision Quality First Teaching Lesson planning
Triumph or disaster, students often fixate only on their mock exam marks. Paul Jenkins looks at four common reasons students lose marks in exams and considers how teachers can use the data they have from mock exams to tailor their teaching, target improvements, and support student exam preparation
Targeted: Every lost mark in an exam can typically be traced back to one of four areas so teachers must use their mock exam data to target specific improvements for students to work on during their revision - Adobe Stock

Given the enormous amount of time and effort poured into the creating and marking of mock exam assessments, it is vital to fully mine the wealth of information the results provide.

Yet, with the unrelenting pressure to keep the curriculum juggernaut moving forward, it is tempting to simply hand back the papers, laboriously plough through the answers with the whole class, and then press on. This would be a mistake.

Mocks hold crucial insights that, if harnessed effectively, can shape your teaching to meet individual student needs during this critical final stretch of the year – paving the way for strong results in August.

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