A while ago I read this blog post about the use of knowledge organisers and this blog post about their use in science. I like the idea of knowledge organisers but I did have some reservations about their use. If I handed this out to students at the beginning of a topic some of them might think that this is the only information that they need to learn (even if I tell them it isn’t). Although the knowledge is important, they need to be able to do more than just recall facts – they need to apply it to different questions.
I attempted to use a knowledge organiser with a Y8 class a while ago and gave them a table with keywords and their definitions for the lesson. The definitions had been completed but the keywords had been left blank – the idea was that they would fill this in as we worked through the lesson. This didn’t go as I had planned. I had put the keywords in alphabetical order rather than the order that they would be encountered in the lesson. This led to confusion as some students did not like the fact that they had filled in the keyword for box 3 and thought they had missed 1 and 2. Despite this I will try again with KS3 – I will just rethink how it is presented to them. I will also think about the ways in which Shaun Allison described their use in class and how I can incorporate some of those ideas.
Using the correct scientific terminology is very important and a knowledge organiser is one way in which students can access that information. I think that knowledge organisers are a valuable revision tool that is why I have created some for my students to use. I have created two versions, the student version has blank boxes for them to complete during revision. I will be introducing these to my GCSE classes next week to use in their revision for the summer exams. I think that they will be popular with some students who want information in this way to use as a start point. I think that some students would struggle with them though – I can think of a number of students with literacy issues who would not find these helpful and I will need to provide alternative material for them. I will emphasise to all students though that they will need to be able to do more than just recall the information and I will encourage them to answer as many past paper questions as possible.
The knowledge organisers I have created are for OCR 21st Century Science.