It's exam question time. Woo! Your favourite time, I know. Specifically, though,
today we're going to be looking at how to answer a 4 mark, 'explain one way'
exam question from paper one of the Edexcel 9-1 GCSE history exam. That was a
mouthful. Also, a quick disclaimer if you're doing any other exam board then the
help I give in this video is not use to you because the way your exam board want
you to answer exam questions will be different. But, for those of you who are
taking Edexcel, what topic you're doing - crime and punishment, medicine, warfare
- doesn't matter. Though, the example I'll use will be crime and punishment because
that's what I did at GCSE so it's what I know about. All right, let's get on with
this. When I answer exam questions I like to have structures because that way, so
long as you have the right knowledge, you can basically guarantee yourself most of
the marks. I'm sure you've heard of the very basic structure that everyone's
known about since year 7: PEE. Point Evidence Explain, or Point Example
Explain as I've sometimes heard it called. We're going to use something like
this but mix it up a little. For an 'explain one way' question we'll use PEEEEL
which stands for Point Evidence Explain Evidence Explain Link. Got it? Good.
First of all, we need a point. What is a point? In this case, it's what we're going
to talk about in our response to the question. So, for example, if our question
was 'Explain one way in which the treatment of those accused of witchcraft
in the early modern period was similar to the treatment of conscientious
objectors in the twentieth century', then, to answer that question, we could talk
about how both conscientious objectors and people accused of witchcraft were
isolated from society. So their isolation would be our point. To make life even
easier, I would always start the first sentence in the same way, as well. As
getting that first sentence down is often one of the hardest bits. The examiner
doesn't really care if all your answers start in the same formulaic way, even on
the questions where SPaG is marked. So, don't worry. I would start any answer to
this question something like this: 'one way the [insert first topic from question]
is [similar/different] to [insert other topic from question] is - and then
you make your point'. So, for us, that would be 'One way the treatment of those
accused of witchcraft in the early modern period is similar to the
treatment of conscientious objectors is their isolation from society'. All right,
so now we've got a point, it's time for our next step: evidence. In order to
explain what evidence is, I'm going to introduce you to a new acronym because I
think it's quite good one. This acronym got used so much whilst I was doing GCSE
that it's a word in its own right in my head now - so creds the head of history
at my school for that one. This wonderful acronym is 'SPEND'. Statistics Places
Events Names and Dates. Essentially, all that specific information that you need
in order to get marks. How this relates to evidence is that your evidence is
your relevant SPEND information. So in our answer we're going to talk about the
first half of the question:, witchcraft, first. For us, some nice relevant SPEND
could be that 'it was common belief that witches had made a pact with the devil
in return for magical powers such as the ability to fly and to make people and
farm animals sick and die.' But there are plenty of other options you could choose
as well. Now we have some evidence, it's time to explain. In this case, 'explain'
means showing how this SPEND information links to what
we're talking about in the question - people accused of witchcraft being
isolated from society. So we could say something like this: 'this association
with the Devil meant people were very afraid of witches and thus stayed away
from anyone accused of witchcraft, causing them to become isolated from the
rest of society.' So that's half the question done. Now it's time to address
the other half of the question: conscientious objectors. To show that we
are now switching to the other topic we could write 'In the case of conscientious
objectors' and then put our evidence. So, we need some evidence to do with them.
Some good SPEND about conscientious objectors might be 'Many were given white
feathers by members of the public as a symbol of shame for refusing to fight in
the First World War.' Then, as before, we need to explain how this links to them
being isolated. 'High casualty rates in the war meant many people were
personally affected by losses and thus thought it was unfair that some people
seemingly got out of their duty to fight. This built resentment to the point where
people did not want to associate with conscientious objectors and many became
isolated from society.' Now, for the final step: link. All this step requires is
another mindless formulaic sentence to make sure the examiner knows you've not
gone off on too much of a tangent and are still answering the question. 'Therefore,
one way in which' and then we repeat a huge chunk of the question, and our point.
'The treatment of witchcraft in the early modern period was similar to that of
conscientious objectors in the 20th century was through their isolation from
society.' Boom! You're done. You should end up with one slightly oversized paragraph
like I have just here. It's important to reiterate also that this structure
should work no matter what topic. So say, for instance, you're doing medicine
through time and not crime and punishment, then this structure will work
for you in your paper one, question three. Now, all I can recommend is you go away
in practice. Go and write as many answers as you can, and hassle your teacher
forcing them to mark your answers until you get 4/4 every time.
That's what I did and I got a grade 9. So it must work, even if your teacher hates
you afterwards. Mine doesn't hate me ...I hope. If you want questions to practice
on then I'll leave some for crime and punishment in the description and I'll
attempt to find some for the other topics. But they'll probably be many more
crime and punishment questions because, again, that's what I know about. Anyway,
thanks for watching, don't forget to like, subscribe and tell all your friends. Also,
if you found this video useful, please leave a comment and tell me what it is
that's useful as this is my first to this type of video and it would be good
to know what works. But, if you do also have any useful critique, then you can
leave that too.