GCSE Prepper Primary Research into question styles
GCSE Prepper’s mission is to build the most effective online tool possible to help students prepare for their science GCSEs.
We believe that this requires us to present students with experience of answering the kind of questions they will face in their exams.
As scientists who believe in the power of research, we decided to conduct a study into the question styles that are employed and the weight of marks available if you master each.
The results may surprise you and are available below.
Summary of findings
A significant majority of the marks are given for ‘recall and apply’ questions that test students’ ability to recall information from the specification and apply it to different situations.
This is particularly true for the Higher papers where ‘recall and apply’ questions make up between 61% (Biology) and 76% (Chemistry) of the marks.
3+ mark questions
More than half of the marks in the Higher level papers in all subjects come from complex ‘recall and apply’ or ‘calculation’ questions (i.e. sub-questions offering 3 or more marks).
Recall and apply questions
47% – 76% of the marks in all of the papers require students to recall information without prompting & often to apply it to different situations.
Calculation questions
Calculation questions were the next most important category on all of the Higher papers and on Physics Foundation.
Multiple choice questions
Multiple choice questions make up between 5 & 8% of the Higher paper marks and 18 to 32.5% of the Foundation paper marks.
Data Overview
Below is the complete summary of results obtained from this analysis.
| Biology | Chemistry | Physics | ||||
| Question style segment | Foundation | Higher | Foundation | Higher | Foundation | Higher |
| Traditional multiple choice | 15.0% | 3.0% | 12.5% | 4.0% | 9.5% | 3.0% |
| Other multiple choice | 14.5% | 5.5% | 20.0% | 1.0% | 8.5% | 2.0% |
| Simple calculation (1 to 2 marks) |
8.0% | 6.0% | 14.5% | 5.0% | 19.0% | 3.5% |
| Complex calculation (3+ marks) | 1.5% | 20.5% | 1.5% | 11.5% | 13.0% | 26.0% |
| Simple recall & apply (1 to 2 marks) |
41.5% | 26.5% | 25.5% | 36.5% | 31.0% | 34.5% |
| Complex recall & apply (3+ marks) | 17.5% | 34.5% | 21.5% | 39.5% | 18.0% | 28.0% |
| Plot data on a graph | 2.0% | 4.0% | 4.5% | 2.5% | 1.0% | 3.0% |
| Total | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Biology | Chemistry | Physics | ||||
| Question style segment | Foundation | Higher | Foundation | Higher | Foundation | Higher |
| All multiple choice | 29.5% | 8.5% | 32.5% | 5.0% | 18.0% | 5.0% |
| All calculations | 9.5% | 26.5% | 16.0% | 16.5% | 32.0% | 29.5% |
| All ‘recall & apply’ | 59.0% | 61.0% | 47.0% | 76.0% | 49.0% | 62.5% |
| Plot data on a graph / chart | 2.0% | 4.0% | 4.5% | 2.5% | 1.0% | 3.0% |
| Total | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
Methodology
To help you better understand our process and accuracy of our results here is a summary of methodology used.
For full process please see the complete analysis.
- We identified 16 different question categories that AQA used in their June 2018 papers for Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
- We allocated all of the sub-questions from AQA’s Paper 1 & Paper 2 for June 2018 for all of the sciences into one of these categories.
- We aggregated the data for both Higher papers and for both Foundation papers for each sub-section.
- We aggregated the 16 categories into 7 segments to make the data easier to understand.
- We aggregated the data once more to get total figures for all
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