Mastering the art of answering essay questions
Answering essay questions can be a daunting task for most students. Especially when there are structured essay questions and case studies, students need to come up with evidence and supporting content to present their arguments. The main reason why children find it difficult to answer such questions is that it demands heavy memorisation.
Here are a few tips which will help students master the art of answering essay questions!
Plan their essay right
Lack of planning has to be the most common mistake associated with children while writing exams. The moment they get the question paper, they start answering the questions without having a quick glance through the exam paper. What ideally needs to happen is that children need to spend 5-10 minutes reading through the entire question paper. This will help them better plan their approach to answering the questions.
The same approach needs to be catered to when answering essay questions. Children need to jot down all the ideas they have in mind on how they are going to approach the essay question. The key points will then help the children in building up the entire content in a structured way.
Structure is essential
To answer essay questions effectively, a structure needs to be followed. They need to properly plan their points and outline the essay. Here are a few templates that will help your children structure their answer well:
- OREO – Opinion, reason, explain, overall link to the topic
- PEEL – point, evidence, elaboration, link
You need to come up with a template that best suits your children’s style. For primary school students, they tend to use OREO, and for secondary school students, they tend to use PEEL. Once they get used to it, it will help your children answer the essay questions in a quick and effective manner.
Strong Supporting content
Evidence is critical when it comes to answering essay questions. Students need to make use of facts, statistics and findings from credible sources to support their answers. Without the supporting content, the answer is going to look unreliable and will lack depth.
So, how can you help your children improve on this?
When subjects like literature, history and social studies are taught at school, encourage them to highlight the important dates and events. These can be used as evidence while answering essay questions.
Practise is key
Get your children to frequently work on essay questions. The more they practise, the better they will get at answering them. It gets them aligned to a routine – read, plan, write and check. This routine will then help them save time during their exam and logically structure their answers.
Practical Exposure
As we already mentioned, it is important that we encourage our children to keep note of real-life occurrences on a frequent basis so that they can use them as evidence while answering essay questions. The best way to ensure they stay aware of the daily happenings is by telling them to read the newspaper on a daily basis. It can be related to various topics – geography, politics or sports. Encourage your children to read a printed newspaper rather than using mobile apps. Reading the newspaper early in the morning is a great habit to develop right from a young age. It will help your children to widen their knowledge and also stay aware of what’s happening in and around the world.
Short and Sweet
Train your children on writing content that is both concise and coherent. It is a general misconception among students that the more pages that you fill during an exam, the better your score will be. We need to educate our children on the differences between quality and quantity. They need to be insisted on to work on answers that are well within the word limit assigned and the marks allocated to a particular question. Answering to the point and using sharp words can help you score well on the essay questions.
We hope the above-mentioned pointers help your children answer the essay questions effectively.
All the best! 🙂
Exam Smart Tips
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Exam Smart Tip #3 – Establishing Routines!
Exam Smart Tip #4 – Let’s Read Carefully!
Exam Smart Tip #5 – Beating the Exam Fever!
Exam Smart Tip #6 – How to Eat Right for the Exams?
Exam Smart Tip #7 – How to Avoid a Meltdown?
Exam Smart Tip #8 – Taking Stress out of Tests
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