Five types of exams you need to use in your PE classroom - Part 2 of 3

In last week’s post, I wrote extensively about collaborative exams that can be utilised by PE teachers in PE classrooms to improve the performance of examination PE classrooms. You can read the whole blog post here: Five types of exams you need to use in your PE classroom - Part 1 of 3.

I wholeheartedly endorse those methods and, if done well in your classroom, I guarantee that your students will respond well. 

But this week I want to take a different tack. I want to write about types of exams. In both cases, I believe that the two types I am going to advocate for below are underutilised in PE classrooms. Therefore, I am inviting you to consider whether these practices could improve standards for your learners. 

Exam type 2: Skill-based exam practice

Put simply, exam practice should be skills-focused before it is content-focused. Let’s say that you are planning your Edexcel GCSE PE course and you want to integrate exam writing, marking and reviewing at least once a fortnight. The obvious protocol is to examine blocks of content as you progress through the course. Indeed, you should but this practice needs to be secondary to the skills you choose to practise.

Take a look at this image:

It was published in a previous post about my principles of PE classrooms. And now look at it again:

Each encircled section is a two-week block of learning. The content of each two-week block is clearly identified in the final column but it is the penultimate column that deserves the most attention. Notice that specific skills are being developed in each exam and even include distinctions between different types of explaining skills such as explaining why and how. These skill-focused exam experiences enable very rich conversations between teacher and learners about not just examining content but specifically about skill progression and distinction. 

If you teach an examined PE course, I want you to answer this question for yourself: can your students explicitly differentiate between describing and explaining, say? If not, why not? If not, what mechanism needs to be included in your course planning to enable them to do so? 

In case there is any doubt about this, take a look at the skills distribution for Edexcel GCSE PE:

Being able to explain is absolutely critical to student success; as is describing, albeit to a lesser extent. Please also note that the 15-mark average for ‘Evaluate’ is representative of both the Edexcel exam papers pre- and post-exam structure changes in 2023. 

Exam type 3: Interleaved exam practice

This one is so important! PE teachers must –and I’m confident to stress must– incorporate interleaved exam practice as much as possible. Interleaving exam practice can simply mean that the exam practice that you structure for your students should include topic areas (and skills) that have been recently learned mixed together with those that have been previously learned. I could end this description here but a little nuance is worth considering.

When you consider which topics or skills to interleave there is a counterintuitive process to follow. Teachers must interleave topics and skills that, potentially, could be confusable with one another. For example, if you wish to do some exam practice on respiratory values such as minute ventilation and tidal volumes, consider interleaving these experiences with questions on cardiac volumes, say. These two topics have multiple overlapping concepts and even terminology. It is for exactly this reason that they should be practised together. Interleaved practice needs to achieve two things:

1. Desirable difficulty - this provides additional challenge in the short term but better retention in the long term.
2. Discriminative contrast - students are expected to be able to differentiate between topic areas and skills, especially when they are similar. 

Please note that interleaving exam practice is not as simple as putting all content together. No! Content areas and skills must be specifically selected in order to achieve desirable difficulty and discriminative contrast. Here are a handful of examples from standard GCSE PE-type Paper 1 exams:

These examples are not exhaustive by any means and they should also be accompanied by instruction, quizzing and other exercises which are similarly interleaved. Take, for example, the teaching of joints. Personally, I don’t know how to instruct that topic accurately without referring to the concepts of levers and axes. The ideas are implicitly linked and, just as I will explain these ideas in unison, I expect my students to practise their exam questions with the same associations. 

You can find out more about interleaving in your PE and Sports lessons in this infographic available here: 

Download The EverLearner's guide to interleaving in PE and Sports lessons. 

And by watching my webinar here:

Watch The EverLearner's webinar on interleaving in PE and Sports lessons. 

So, there you have it for part two. I am outright endorsing the importance of interleaved exam practice and also skill-based exam practice. 

I also urge readers to look at my ExamSimulator software, which is designed to produce these behaviours naturally. For example, ExamSimulator incentivises skill-based exams and this is one of the biggest influences I have had in the PE sector to date. I encourage you to join me in that practice.

Thanks for reading.

James