Just Tell Me How?

On a large online forum where GCSE students ask each other for help, two requests appear again and again. Students want to know what the exam will ask, and they want somebody to mark their essays. One student’s post shows the problem behind both requests in a few words: the student had been reading grade 9 answers, and still came out of the exam with a 5.

Our own students seldom say that wish out loud, but it shows itself in another way. Sometimes we tell a student that for the next two hours they will tackle a paper on their own. Some are shocked, because they had expected us to sit down and talk it through with them. It happens often enough that we spend time before lessons preparing students for it. Not every session is a conversation.

The student on the forum had been given something close to being told exactly how. A grade 9 answer shows every choice a top student made, in order, on a real question, so in one sense it is the fullest instruction a student can be given. If being told how were enough, reading those answers should have been enough. So what was missing?

You can know the rule and still not drive

Start with something that has nothing to do with English. Learner drivers in Britain study a short rule in the Highway Code, the official rulebook for British roads, which repeats it after several of its rules: “Mirrors – Signal – Manoeuvre”.^[1] It takes a few seconds to learn, and you could recite it correctly to a friend tonight. Would that make you ready to drive onto a busy roundabout at rush hour?

Most people would say no, even though nothing in the rule is hard to understand. A rule can be learned in seconds; using it at a junction, with a lorry behind you and a cyclist on your left, only comes after many hours of driving.

In 1982 the psychologist John Anderson wrote a paper about how people acquire skills, and he described two stages. In the first, “the instruction is encoded as a set of facts about the skill”, and a beginner often has to talk themselves through each step: “Verbal mediation is frequently observed because the facts have to be rehearsed in working memory.”^[2] He called it the declarative stage. In the second stage, the procedural stage, the same knowledge is “directly embodied in procedures for performing the skill”.^[2] An experienced driver checks the mirror before turning without reciting anything, because the rule has stopped being a fact and has become part of how they drive.

Psychologists use two short phrases for this difference. Declarative knowledge is knowing that something is the case, such as a quotation, a date or the rule about mirrors. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. A skill is procedural, like playing an instrument or speaking a language. Being told can only give a student declarative knowledge, because what one person can pass to another in words is a set of facts.

How does the first kind turn into the second? Anderson’s answer begins with two words: “With practice the knowledge is converted into a procedural form in which it is directly applied”.^[2] No amount of further telling does the converting.

A model answer gives facts, not skill

Go back to the student on the forum. A grade 9 answer is a set of facts about a skill. It shows that a strong paragraph makes a clear point, chooses a short quotation, and explains what one word in that quotation does to the reader. Reading it gives a student all of those facts at once, but it cannot give them the thing the exam measures: the ability to produce such a paragraph themselves, on a question they have never seen.

When a mark stays stuck at 5, the obvious fix is more of the same instruction: another model answer, another revision video, another page of notes on what examiners want. Research on memory suggests why that fix disappoints. In 2008 Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger asked university students to learn words in a foreign language. Once a student could recall a word, some of them studied it again and some were tested on it again. Their result was this: “Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect.”^[3] The students could not tell the difference from the inside either, because their “predictions of their performance were uncorrelated with actual performance”.^[3]

That study was about remembering words, which is much simpler than writing an essay. We think the lesson still applies to essays. A model answer can be read again and again, and each reading feels useful, but reading never asks the student to produce anything.

Telling is where practice starts

If more telling is not the answer, what kind of practice is? In 1993 Anders Ericsson and two colleagues published a study of how musicians become excellent, based on research with violinists in Berlin. They called the kind of practice that makes the difference deliberate practice, and their paper sets out what it contains.^[4]

Their account does not leave out teaching. Instruction is where practice starts, and the task should be one that “can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction”.^[4] After that come feedback and repetition: the learner should get “immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance” and should “repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks”.^[4] Deliberate practice is also aimed at particular faults, since “specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further”.^[4]

Feedback is the part that cannot be skipped. Without it, the authors write, “efficient learning is impossible and improvement only minimal even for highly motivated subjects”.^[4] A student who writes twenty essays that nobody reads carefully has practised twenty times, but has not been corrected once.

Ericsson and his colleagues add one more point that students rarely hear: “deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable”.^[4] We think this explains much of the wish to be told. Being told is comfortable, because it asks nothing of you until the exam. Practice feels harder precisely because it shows you, on every attempt, what you cannot yet do.

This is how we work with our own students. Each piece of writing is written by the student alone first. We then assess it to find exactly where the strengths and weaknesses are, and the student redrafts it. Each part of a paragraph carries its own marks, so a student can see which part is costing them most. In our experience, the part that costs most is often the effect of the writer’s choices on the reader. A student who knows this can practise that one part until it improves. We have written more about targeted practice in Is School Enough?.

New questions, and help that fades

There is one more reason why being told is not enough in English. Educational psychologists often sort thinking into levels, using a model called Bloom’s taxonomy. Its revised version, published in 2001, places remembering at the base and three kinds of thinking at the top.^[5] Analysing is “Breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose”. Evaluating is “Making judgments based on criteria and standards”. Creating is “Putting elements together to form a novel, coherent whole or make an original product”.^[5]

GCSE English asks for all three at once, and every question in the exam is new to the student. The extract is one they have never read, or the question is one they have never answered. We think a memorised essay proves knowledge of one text, while the skill is what lets a student meet any text and think about it.

Does that mean every practice piece should be new, or that a student should work alone? It does not. A student who is still learning a skill needs help with it. The research says that help should shrink as the skill grows. Researchers who reviewed studies of learners in technical subjects found that “detailed worked examples were most appropriate when presented to novices, but they should be gradually faded out with increased levels of learner knowledge and be replaced by problems”.^[6] We ask a student to write alone first, and then give them a lot of support for the redraft.

Knowledge of one text does not carry over to a new text by itself. In a study of adults learning to negotiate, people who compared two cases transferred the idea to a new case far more often than people who studied each case separately: 48% against 19%. The researchers also found that learners “tend not to spontaneously compare cases that lack surface similarity— even when the two cases are presented in immediate succession”.^[7] That study did not involve English or teenagers, so we treat it as a reason to try, not a proof. It is one reason we move a student on to a different text, and later bring them back to the first one, so that the same idea has been met in more than one place. As the exam gets closer, we focus more on mixed past papers, on questions the student has never seen.

One of our students, Yusuf, met a question this summer that we had not prepared with him, with no plan and no model answer, and he still scored full marks on it. We told that story in Stop Timing Essays. What he carried into the exam hall was a skill he could use on a question he had never met.

Revision should end in writing

None of this means that knowledge stops mattering. Quotations still have to be learned, and a student who cannot remember the text has nothing to analyse. What changes is what revision is for. Reading notes and model answers gives a student the facts about the skill, as it did for the student on the forum. Writing, being corrected, and writing again is what turns those facts into something they can do, first with a lot of help and then with less. Coming back to older work later, and trying new questions, is what checks that the skill has stuck.

Four things to do this week

1. Write before you read. Take a question you have never answered and write your answer first. Only when your answer is finished should you read a model answer on the same question and compare the two, paragraph by paragraph.

2. Choose one weakness, not five. Look at your last marked essay and find the part that lost the most marks. Practise only that part, in three new paragraphs on three different quotations.

3. Get it marked, then write it again. A mark on its own tells you where you are. The redraft is where the correction actually becomes part of how you write.

4. Parents: ask to see something written, not something read. Ask your child what they wrote this week, and on which question. Hours spent reading notes are real hours, but they are the easy half of the work.

If you would like to know which part of your child’s writing to practise first, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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