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Key words: topic words, restricting words, instruction words

When you are set a writing task, you are expected to answer the set question. The most common complaint from lecturers is that students don't answer the question or only answer part of it. There are few marks for essays that don't answer the set question-even if they are well written!

About question analysis

You need to use question analysis for assignments, exam essays and short answer questions. If you learn the steps for question analysis and take 10-15 minutes to think through the question in this systematic way, then you will have a good start to writing a successful essay-one that pleases the lecturer!

Tools for question analysis

The following five steps can be used to analyse ALL questions:
1. Read the whole question twice 2. Look for topic words
Topic words are easy to locate. They tell you what you have to write about. But be careful as you may only have to write about some aspect of this topic. Never stop here! Go to the next step (restricting words).
3. Look for any words that may restrict the topic in any way
Restricting words are words or phrases that narrow the topic and make it more specific, i.e. this is the part of the broad topic that the lecturer wants you to investigate- you will only be given marks on subject matter that is restricted to the aspect of the topic.
4. Look for instruction words
Instruction words are words that tell you what to do. Be careful with these. If the lecturer wants you to describe, your answer will not be the same as when you are asked to critically assess. The ASO factsheet: Analysing the question gives you a number of common instruction words and shows you what they mean. Be careful:

Words such as what, how and why can also be used, and you will have to interpret the specific meaning behind the question

Two or more instruction words in a question means that you will have to answer each part of the question.

5. Rewrite the question in your own words.
Rewriting the question in your own words is a good way of making sure that you have understood the question, BUT you must stay close to the original question. Then, you need to match your version to the original-if you have any doubts about your interpretation, check with your lecturer.

Exercise 1: Analysing a question

READ this question twice then analyse the question using the question analysis steps:

Discuss why assignment essays are common assessment tasks in undergraduate tertiary coursework, and evaluate the effectiveness of assignments as an avenue for learning.

1. What is the main topic of this essay?

Discuss; evaluate

incorrect.

incorrect.

Assignment essays

Correct!

2. What are the restricting words?

Discuss; evaluate

incorrect.

Correct!

Assignment essays

incorrect.

3. What are the instruction words?

Discuss; evaluate

Correct!

incorrect.

Assignment essays

incorrect.

4. How many parts are there to be answered in the question?

5. If I rephrase the question so that I can test my understanding, which ONE of the following has all of the elements of the question?

incorrect.

incorrect.

Correct!

Exercise 2: Question analysis

When you are analysing a question for an assignment or in exams, you need a system to mark up your text (scribble notes around the question) using highlighters, arrows and short notes. Develop a code that you can use for all of your question analysis needs. An example is demonstrated below.

The trouble with questions

The trouble with questions is that they don't always follow the same pattern. Sometimes, the lecturers write a brief question, and other times you may get a page of instructions about what is required. Sometimes, instruction words are like those on the ASO factsheet: Analysing the question, and at other times you need to interpret key words to match the instruction words.

For example, here are two other versions of our workshop question:

The question starts with a statement.
Assignment essays are common assessment tasks in undergraduate tertiary coursework. Discuss why they are set and evaluate the effectiveness of assignments as an avenue for learning.

The question doesn't use 'instruction' words.
Why are assignment essays common assessment tasks in undergraduate tertiary coursework, and are they effective as an avenue for learning?

You still follow the same steps, but you will need to recognize the differences and spend time interpreting the question until you are satisfied that you are on the right path.

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Key words: topic words, restricting words, instruction words When you are set a writing task, you are expected to answer the set question. The most common complaint from lecturers is that students don't answer the question or only answer part of it.

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Chunking helps students approach challenging texts by breaking down content into manageable pieces.

English & Language Arts

History

Social Studies

Most teachers are willing to tackle the difficult topics, but we need the tools.

- Gabriela Calderon-Espinal, Bay Shore, NY

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Chunking helps students approach challenging texts by breaking down content into manageable pieces.

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Strategies and links to

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During the course of a typical lesson or unit of study, teachers regularly present students with new information. Sometimes the information is peripheral-even if students do not understand it, they can still grasp the overall goal of the lesson or unit. However, sometimes the information is essential-without it, students will have little chance of comprehending the overall goal.

Five Avenues to Understanding

To help students process information that is essential to understanding specific content, teachers can use an effective strategy that involves the following five elements.

Chunking

Chunking means presenting new information in small, digestible bites. This requires carefully examining the manner in which students will experience new content. If the teacher intends to present content in the form of a lecture, he or she needs to determine the crucial points at which to pause so students can interact with one another about the new information.

For example, for a lecture on the topic of theoretical probability, the teacher might decide to make her first stop after she has discussed some basic differences between theoretical and experimental probability. If she's using a videotape or a video clip she's downloaded from the Internet, she might decide to stop the video about two minutes into the discussion of how theoretical probability is used in games of chance. This idea of stopping so that students can digest the information also holds true for demonstrations, exhibitions, guest speakers, reading content in a textbook, and the like.

Scaffolding

Whereas chunking involves the size of the bites for new content, scaffolding involves the content of the bites and their logical order. To illustrate, let's say that a teacher is showing students a strategy for editing a composition for overall organizational logic. The teacher might organize the steps in that strategy into three chunks. The first chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition has good transitions from paragraph to paragraph. The second chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the major sections of the composition (that is, its beginning, middle, and end) logically flow into one another. The third chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition as a whole sends a unified message. Each chunk logically sets up the next chunk.

Interacting

Interacting refers to how students process the information in each chunk. One common way to facilitate processing is to organize students in groups and ask each group to summarize the content in the chunk, identify what was confusing, try to clear up the confusion, and predict what information might be found in the next chunk.

It's important that as many students as possible respond. Teachers can increase the response rate to questions in several ways. One technique, response chaining, involves having students respond to the answers of other students. Students can agree with, disagree with, or add to a response. Another technique is to use the voting technologies that frequently come with interactive white boards. These allow students to electronically cast their vote regarding the correct answer to a question. Their responses are immediately displayed on a pie chart or bar graph, enabling teacher and students to discuss the different perceptions of the correct answer. If voting technologies are not available, students can record their responses on inexpensive slates.

Pacing

As its name implies, pacing involves the extent to which a teacher moves through chunks at an appropriate pace-not too fast and not too slow. The teacher will need to slow down if students do not understand the content in a particular chunk or speed up when student engagement in a chunk begins to wane.

Monitoring

Monitoring involves continually checking for student understanding. If students do not understand the content in a particular chunk, the teacher revisits or reteaches that information before moving on to another chunk.

What Teacher Research Found

1. Scaffolding is the keystone of the entire process. If the content of the chunks does not follow a logical progression to a clear goal, the rest of the process is not as effective in enhancing student learning.

2. A necessary component of interacting is keeping the student response rate high. By the time a class period ends, all students should have responded to multiple questions or been asked to explain their summaries of the content. Students should discuss all answers and summaries as opposed to just moving on in response to a correct answer.

3. Monitoring should be a natural outcome of effective interaction. If the teacher asks many students to report on how they summarized, cleared up confusions, and so on, he or she should have a good sense of how well students understand the new content. Likewise, if a number of students have responded to questions about the new content, the teacher should have a good sense of the entire class's level of understanding.

4. Teachers cannot easily predetermine their pacing. Rather, they must continually read student engagement levels and adjust the pace accordingly.

When executed well, this process dramatically increases students' understanding of new information across content areas and at every grade level, which makes it a strategy that all teachers can use to great benefit.

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The Art and Science of Teaching / Helping Students Process Information - ASCD

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During the course of a typical lesson or unit of study, teachers regularly present students with new information. Sometimes the information is peripheral-even if students do not understand it, they can still grasp the overall goal of the lesson or unit. However, sometimes the information is essentia

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The purpose of a science report is to clearly communicate your key message about why your scientific findings are meaningful. In order to do this, you need to explain why you are testing a hypothesis, what methodology you used, what you found, and why your findings are meaningful. This requires a clear link between your introduction and your analysis/discussion.

Structure

Science reports tend to have a more typical structure than business reports. The structure is designed to clearly outline the key message of the research. It does this through indicating existing research, the significance of the current research, the research aim or hypothesis, what research was actually conducted, what was found, what the findings mean and imply. The structure in the table below outlines a typical scientific report.

Introduction

Introductions need to logically justify, using the relevant literature, the reason for doing the experiment. They typically contain:

background contextual information

what is being investigated

the significance of your research

what previous studies have found in this area

aims and hypothesis (depending on the discipline)

Body section

The body of a science report contains the bulk of the information and writing. It typically contains the following:

Methods: a precise and concise explanation of what you did. It is important that this is written in such a way that it could be replicated by other researchers.

Results: present your findings with appropriately and clearly presented graphs, tables, charts, and explanations.

Discussion

The discussion is an important section of your report and is often the most challenging to write. This is where you present the analysis of what your findings mean. You outline whether or not your findings support the hypothesis presented in the introduction and the extent to which your findings agree with previous research, also presented in the introduction. If not, you can put forward suggestions as to why and present ideas for ways that future research could address these issues. The discussion is the section that requires careful consideration in terms of structure, in the same way that an essay does. You have a key message about your research and findings that you need to present, and your structure needs to support that.

The final paragraph of your discussion is the conclusion. In science reports, conclusions are brief summaries of the findings and may reemphasise the key message of your report.

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The purpose of a science report is to clearly communicate your key message about why your scientific findings are meaningful. In order to do this, you need to explain why you are testing a hypothesis, what methodology you used, what you found, and why your findings are meaningful.

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This resource is essay based, however could be applied to other text forms.

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At university, you will come across many different kinds of essay questions. The one thing to remember, no matter the question, is that academic essay writing is persuasive. This means that you are expected to take a position and present an argument in order to convince the reader of your views.

A position refers to taking a stance on a question or an issue. An argument is a list of reasons, supported by evidence, that are used to persuade readers of that position.

Arguing for a position goes beyond simple description or the presentation of a series of facts. It means understanding the question, engaging with the debate and using evidence critically.

These pages provide strategies you can use to help refine, structure and present your position and argument throughout a written essay. The principles of persuasive writing presented here apply to most forms of academic writing and can be adapted to all disciplines.
Find your argument >>

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At university, you will come across many different kinds of essay questions. The one thing to remember, no matter the question, is that academic essay writing is persuasive. This means that you are expected to take a position and present an argument in order to convince the reader of your views.

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Etymological knowledge - identifying how words reflect their derivations | Student assessment

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Building word recognition and spelling skills through improving etymological knowledge. Engaging students with how words and letter combinations are derived from other languages. Students will spell words with the same base word by understanding why the word is spelt as it is due to the original meaning of the base word.

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Providing text structure | Student assessment

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Some general strategies for improving paragraphs for whole text structure include: deconstructing exemplars; 'Order, order!' sequencing text from 'cut up' paragraphs; reconstructing text for a different audience/purpose; 'Guess who' identifying the purpose of the text and who the targeted audience might be based on the structure; peer editing with a focus on structure; 'What's missing?'

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Grade 6 Classroom Snapshot - Celebrating Teaching & Learning In the classroom of Mary Hall Sixth Grade Social Studies Teacher Winner of the O'Flaherty Teacher of the Year Award Palos Verdes Intermediate School and District Reading Resource Specialist for Grades 4-8 Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, Palos Verdes, CA Mary Hall is the teacher that every parent wants his/her child to have!

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Expanding vocabulary. This includes subject specific vocabulary

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Graphic organisers are a way to plan written responses. Consider using this skill to plan ideas, structure and key information within a response.

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Awareness of purpose for and audience of writing is an important skill for students. This connects to a number of elements of writing including: vocabulary, register and structure

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After teaching students how to organize essays effectively, I was on top of the world. I started my own blog about how great I was. I assigned my students another essay, collected it and realized my students did not understand writing for purpose and audience. In shock, I logged on to my blog, erased what I had written, sent individual e-mails to all three people who had read it and cancelled my day trip to Charleston, South Carolina.

I had work to do. I had to devise a lesson plan that helped students understand the importance of writing for purpose and audience. Here's what I came up with.

Getting Started

1) Cover the following points about writing for purpose and audience:

Your audience determines what you write, what examples and details to include, what to emphasize, word choice and tone.

Your purpose for writing determines what you write, the point of your writing, and how you will make your point.

Knowing audience and purpose gives your writing focus.

2) Divide students in to groups of 3-4

Assign a topic.

Give each group a card with a specific purpose (to inform, to entertain, to persuade), and a specific audience. For example, one group could write an informative essay about riding the bus for new students; one group could write an entertaining experience about a bus ride for publication in the school newspaper; another group could write a persuasive article on why there needs to be air conditioning on the school bus to the principal.

Procedures

Help students focus on their purpose and audience on the first draft

Each group writes a paragraph directed to the specified audience with a specified purpose. For best results, use butcher paper.

When students have completed their writing, ask each group to read it to the class. If they used butcher paper, have them tape the essay to the wall.

Have students guess the audience and purpose, noting key components.

Note differences in writing on the board.

Help students revise their own essays

Instruct students to copy the following questions: For whom am I writing? What point do I want to make? What idea am I trying to convey?

Instruct students to read their rough drafts, answering the above questions as they read.

Collect the answers to the questions and instruct students to rewrite their drafts, focused on the intended audience and purpose.

This lesson has been adapted from Susan Geye's Mini Lessons for Revision, 1997.

Lesson Plans: Fine Tune Your Writing Focus

Writing that lacks focus confuses readers. Student writing lacks focus because they rarely have a purpose, do not know how to make a point, and write to an imaginary, non-existent audience. End their pointless meanderings with these simple lesson plans.

1. Lesson Plan: Determining Audience and Purpose

2. Teaching Students to Maintain a Personal Voice in Writing

3. A Lesson Plan on Using Tone Effectively

4. A Lesson Plan in Creating the Perfect Title

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Lesson Plan: Writing for Purpose and Audience. Teach Students How to Write and Revise with Purpose and Audience in Mind.

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After teaching students how to organize essays effectively, I was on top of the world. I started my own blog about how great I was. I assigned my students another essay, collected it and realized my students did not understand writing for purpose and audience.

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Word banks can be used to collate key terminology for written responses. Word banks can be categorised in a number of ways including: parts of speech, senses, connectives, topics, topic vocabulary etc.

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In order to begin building their writing vocabulary beyond a small collection of high frequency and familiar words, students need to have opportunities to learn and rehearse a wider range of vocabulary in meaningful contexts. Consider the vocabulary demands of units of learning and plan in order to provide explicit learning opportunities in all learning areas for key content vocabulary.

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This resource provides both and explanation of the skill and explicit teaching strategies to support planning and programming.

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It is often helpful in developing ideas to adapt to modes of thinking: divergent and convergent thinking. In the divergent thinking mode ideas are to be expanded on, developed, tangents explored. After this mode then we can switch into convergent thinking where we refine, make connections and streamline our thinking.

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Interpreting what is being asked to do is essential to a student writing an effective response.

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CRAAP Tool

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This article gives strategies for students to use when locating information in a text

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By practicing a step-by-step technique, the main idea of a text is within the reach of even struggling readers.

Getting the main idea out of a text is vital to reading comprehension. At the same time, finding the main idea is treated as if it were as simple as locating a word. Noted educator and researcher Kylene Beers points out that struggling readers actually need to be taught steps and strategies to determine the main idea, instead of simply told to do so. While for some readers, the task has become instinctive, there are instructable steps to the task.

How to Find the Main Idea of a Text

Reread the passage slowly, and mark the ideas that are clearly supporting details as such. Certain details included in a paragraph will jump out as being interesting, but not necessarily worth remembering. Once these are marked off as "not the main idea," the remaining information can be paraphrased into a single statement to form the main idea of each paragraph.

List the main idea of each paragraph in order. This is less than an outline; it is simply determining the scope of the passage, because the main idea of the passage will take into consideration every paragraph in it.

List the most important words. Scan the list of paragraph topics, and jot down the words that are repeated in all or most of them. It may be necessary to paraphrase one or two of the paragraph topics to have more words in common; just be sure that the new sentence is merely a paraphrase, and that the meaning isn't changed at all.

Write a statement that connects the paragraph topics using all of the repeated words. For example, if a passage had paragraphs about the first marathon, the history of the Boston Marathon, the introduction of the marathon to the Olympics and the first women's Olympic marathon, all those topics would come together into the main idea of "the history of the marathon."

Test your main idea by writing out a statement that explains how the topic of each paragraph connects back to that main idea. Review each paragraph of the text to make sure that the connections are suggested by the text, and are not based on outside knowledge.

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Reading Comprehension: How to Find the Main Idea in Text | Synonym

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By practicing a step-by-step technique, the main idea of a text is within the reach of even struggling readers. Getting the main idea out of a text is vital to reading comprehension. At the same time, finding the main idea is treated as if it were as simple as locating a word.