Yes they are great. It’s a bit like dofe for science! Can do bronze, silver or gold. The bronze ones aren’t too time consuming and I’ve done it for a few years with either year 9 or triple science groups in year 10

Sounds really cool. Is it expensive?

I did research on effect of exercise and meal timing around blood glucose control. Sometimes use old research articles for A-Alevel students for biology club

What do you do for these?

I’ve done quite a few CREST projects at year 9 or year 10. Mostly Bronze and a few silver. Struggled to ever get Gold off the ground at sixth form level. Exams and other things seem to take over

What kind of thing do you do? Agree that time is precious. I’ve run Biology Olympiad before but haven’t done a lot of citizen science so would be interested to know

Would be interested on ideas for the essay and lower attaining students. I find that many really get stuck with even starting a plan… I think a similar problem to even 6-markers at GCSE - find it difficult to even start

Key word lists and then repetition as much as I can. Often make this a focus of recall questions/mini whiteboard work. I find this hard though because (even with lots of prompts) I find that these students don’t often use the right terminology (especially A-Level)

Our English department have done some work around drawing annotations by the side of text (students have to draw at least 3 per page when reading texts/books). Linked to dual coding. Others departments do highlighting and tracking reading. Lots of different ideas at school level

Agree with this completely

We used to start GCSE after Jan in year 9 but felt we never had enough time. Last two years we’ve re-jigged things to teach KS3/GCSE crossover topics in year 9 from the start. A unique position though because we are an upper school (youngest cohort is yr 9)

Would love to see this! I definitely do not do enough

I just do lots of recall questions around carbon dioxide when teaching respiration and photosynthesis first. Try and set a strong foundation knowing that I’ve got to teach carbon cycle afterwards. find students struggle with exam questions though - unless link is obvious in Q

Agreed - especially at A-Level thinking outside of box. For AQA saprobionts feature heavily in the cycles