Dear PE colleagues.
My team and I write a huge volume of exam questions and mark schemes for all kinds of purposes. We write ExamSimulator content for all PE courses as well as National Mock Exams for pretty much every PE course out there. In recent weeks, the team (Andy Tolley, Hannah Curtis, Kim Nkonde and myself) have been analysing and writing ExamSimulator content for the brand-new International Baccalaureate Sports, exercise and health science course (IB SEHS), which is being taught and studied all around the world since September 2024. This course, the first sport and PE course ever to sit alongside biology, chemistry and physics as an equivalent core science offer, has provided us with many challenges. I would like to use this blog post to share those challenges and solutions with you.
One of the problems we faced when writing exam content for the IB SEHS course was that only specimen assessment materials (SAMs) existed as published resources to base our writing on. SAMs, whilst a useful guide in general, have not proved to be a reliable reference point for the actual externally assessed exams that an exam board writes. I am not criticising IB here. In fact, I hope the IB SEHS SAMs and, then, the real IB SEHS exams are a close match. It’s just my experience of the past 26 years of teaching that one needs to be cautious. Furthermore, we spotted some interesting trends in the IB SEHS SAMs that raised questions for us. For example, take a look at this question and focus your attention on (d):
In my opinion, all of these questions are applied and, therefore, the answers a candidate needs to provide should be applied to impacts on bobsleigh performers. However, the mark schemes for these questions within the SAMS are not applied:
In other words, based purely on the provided mark scheme, a candidate could achieve full marks of 9/9 on question 4 without making any explicit reference to bobsleigh. Some will argue that it is up to the teacher to infer the application. That is fine with me but, as an educational resource provider, I do not simply want to provide assessment materials for teachers. I want to provide assessment materials to teachers that help the teacher to guide and educate better.
This posed a quandary because, we believe, mark schemes must answer the question posed including the expressed applications. In the example of question 4 d, an example was stated as a requirement of the question/command but the mark scheme makes no reference to an example. So, could a student write a sentence such as “A golfer would experience diminished intrinsic motivation” and be marked correct? Could they write “A swimmer would experience diminished intrinsic motivation” and be equally correct? What about simply writing “diminished intrinsic motivation”, with no example at all? What about a student who might write “A golfer would experience diminished intrinsic motivation and this could lead them to reduce their driving range time from six hours to three hours per week.” We felt that we needed to write our questions and mark schemes fully with clear expressions of what potential applications might look like but we were concerned this would put us in dissonance with the way the IB SAMs were written, especially the mark schemes.
In the end, we solved this by discussing the issues we perceived with representatives of the IB community including attending their training courses, and we shared our thoughts and observations with numerous IB experts, experienced IB teachers and markers as well as the wider community. The consensus that we reached was that we must “write like IB” but also be brave enough to use our mark schemes for educational purposes and to stress what the actual impact on performance would be. Here’s an example:
Notice how every single mark scheme point is brought back to impact on performance or health or whatever application is required. We focused hard on this as it is one of the explicit requirements of the IB SEHS course and repeatedly stated as a core requirement within the specification. We really hope that these resources will support teachers and students to better understand the implications of their writing whilst not making the achievements of marks any greater than the IB SEHS SAMs seems to require.
We have just launched more than 200 IB SEHS paper 2 exam questions onto TheEverLearner.com and these questions, mark schemes and marking guidance are squarely focussed on a series of performance profiles. This was in response to the results from our IB survey, where there was a clear demand for paper 2 exam questions. We have written about track and field, sailing, volleyball, tennis, basketball, swimming and golf. These resources are available for use now for customers of TheEverLearner.com.
Profile-based exams
With this in mind, we hope that teachers of IB SEHS will be better able to establish profile-based assessments or mini exam papers. For example, as of right now, IB teachers can create an exam paper related to a basketball player that requires thought and writing about a very wide array of topics including lots of HL topics for those on the higher course. Take a look, for example, at a quick summary of how many questions are available for the profiles we have already written:
You will notice that not only have we written a huge volume of questions and mark schemes but that we are following up with new profiles on skiing, boxing, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon very soon providing you, the IB SEHS teacher, with a huge array of options.
Question titles
These profiles are all labelled and searchable when building exams. We have tried to make each question title as clear as possible for teachers.
We have broken down the key components that we feel you need to know, including which paper the question belongs to, the IB theme, whether it is standard level or higher level, as well as the sporting profile and the specific topic of each question.
In the new year we are looking at adding paper 1a multiple choice questions as well as our second phase of paper 2 questions.
Core assessment models
We also urge IB SEHS teachers to use our exam materials to provide a highly reliable core assessment model to your students. Your core assessment model could take many, many formats but, what we are confident in is that you need not write a single question or mark scheme because we have done this for you. Get stuck into our work and start creating a reliable assessment model for you and your students.
Skills-based examining
One area of work that I encourage you to seriously consider is the possibility of skill-based exams. This practice is relevant for teachers of any course and I have written about it on previous occasions. Skill-based examining involves the practice of questions that challenge students’ understanding of command skills as the first priority in addition to their typical experience of answering content-focused questions. For example, imagine that you create an exam paper using our software and content that has the following criteria in priority order:
Notice that the content focus on energy systems and injury is the third most pressing concern for this type of student experience. The top objective is to understand and be able to distinguish between command skills.
Conclusions and summary
So, IB SEHS teachers, please join us on TheEverLearner.com and give your learners the best chance possible of really honing their exam skills. You won’t regret it!
Thanks for reading and have a lovely day.
James