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A-level History 7042
History AS and A-level Specification
PDF | 1.02 MB
1.0 Introduction
1.1 why choose aqa for a-level history, helping students understand the significance of historical events.
Our AS and A-level History qualifications have been designed to help students understand the significance of historical events, the role of individuals in history and the nature of change over time. Our qualifications will help them to gain a deeper understanding of the past through political, social, economic and cultural perspectives. The engaging topics available to them throughout the course will provide them with the knowledge and skills they require to succeed as AS and A-level historians.
Flexibility of choice
We offer teachers and students the choice of British, European, American and World history
Well-resourced and popular topics
- After careful consultation with teachers and Higher Education, we have kept our most popular topics so you can re-use or adapt your departmental resources. We have also developed some new topics in response to teachers’ feedback.
- We have worked closely with a number of publishers to produce textbooks that link directly to the specification.
Teach AS and A-level together
- Our AS not only provides a strong stand-alone qualification, it is also fully co-teachable with the A-level.
- Content for the AS and the first year of the A-level is identical.
- The skills required for AS questions are closely linked to those in A-level questions.
- We clearly articulate the skills and techniques that we expect students to display at AS and A-level as well as producing clear question papers and mark schemes.
We’re confident that you will enjoy teaching our specification and that your students will be able to show what they know, understand and can do, mastering the craft of the A-level historian.
You can find out about all our History qualifications at aqa.org.uk/history .
1.2 Support and resources to help you teach
We know that support and resources are vital for your teaching and that you have limited time to find or develop good quality materials. So we’ve worked with experienced teachers to provide you with a range of resources that will help you confidently plan, teach and prepare for exams.
Teaching resources
We have too many History resources to list here so visit aqa.org.uk/7042 to see them all. They include:
- sample schemes of work and lesson plans to help you plan your course with confidence
- sample question papers and mark schemes
- guidance about source material and teaching resources
- training courses to help you deliver AQA History qualifications.
Preparing for exams
Visit aqa.org.uk/7707 for everything you need to prepare for our exams, including:
- past papers, mark schemes and examiners’ reports
- sample papers and mark schemes for new courses
- example student answers with examiner commentaries.
Analyse your students' results with Enhanced Results Analysis (ERA)
Find out which questions were the most challenging, how the results compare to previous years and where your students need to improve. ERA, our free online results analysis tool, will help you see where to focus your teaching. Register at aqa.org.uk/era
For information about results, including maintaining standards over time, grade boundaries and our post-results services, visit aqa.org.uk/results
Keep your skills up to date with professional development
Wherever you are in your career, there’s always something new to learn. As well as subject-specific training, we offer a range of courses to help boost your skills:
- improve your teaching skills in areas including differentiation, teaching literacy and meeting Ofsted requirements
- help you prepare for a new role with our leadership and management courses.
You can attend a course at venues around the country, in your school or online – whatever suits your needs and availability. Find out more at coursesandevents.aqa.org.uk
Get help and support
Visit our website for information, guidance, support and resources. aqa.org.uk/7201
You can talk directly to the History subject team:
T: 0161 958 3865
How to revise for A-Level History
In A-Level by Think Student Editor September 28, 2024 Leave a Comment
In sixth form, A-Level History was one of my favourite subjects, and yet figuring out exactly how to revise for it and what the best methods for me would be was an entirely different feat. While revision is important for every subject, for ones like A-Level History, which are highly knowledge and information-based, while also being an essay subject, it’s even more crucial. Especially as you don’t only need to know the information, but also how to use it effectively.
When it comes to the A-Level exams, students can often feel unprepared and overwhelmed, I know I did, especially for A-Level History. However, with this article, I’ll give you all the steps you need to be fully prepared for your exams.
Table of Contents
Learn what you need to revise for A-Level History
The first step in figuring out how to revise is knowing exactly what you need to revise. The best way to look at this in general is to look at an overview of the forms of assessment and structure of the A-Level History course.
While it depends on the exam board, you will typically do two or three exams for A-Level History alongside a piece of coursework. In terms of revision, they will only need to revise for the exams as the coursework is done with access to sources and information.
Once again, the exam board that you do your A-Level History course with is important in how your exams work as there is quite a bit of variation. However, students will tend to have several essay questions responding to a theme in a period of history that they’ve covered as well as at least one responding to a source from a certain period that they’ve studied also.
Knowing exactly what you need to revise, including what papers and units you’re doing is crucial as it makes sure that you can use the right revision resources. After all, you wouldn’t want to buy a revision guide, or be using online revision materials that includes themes, or even part of a time period that the exams won’t cover.
The best way to double check this information is to ask your teacher(s) and check the resources they’ve given you.
Also, you will need to make sure that you know the types of questions that will be on your exams.
For A-Level history, these tend to be essay questions about a theme or key figure worth different marks. There will likely also be essay questions based on a source or an interpretation.
Break up your topics
To get the best results, you need to revise everything. However, this won’t work quite so well if you’re trying to revise absolutely everything all at once. Instead, you need to breakdown the topics into smaller subtopics and categorise to know which ones you should be revising first.
Personally, I would start with the main topic of one paper, such as ‘Russia and its rulers’, then break this down into subtopic/ themes or into the individual rulers covered.
After breaking the main topic into subtopics/ themes, you can put them into a chart and rank your confidence in each. Thus, showing you which subtopics, you need to revise the most. From here, you can put these into a revision timetable starting with your weakest topics.
You should make sure that you’re doing this assessment process regularly to ensure that you are confident in each subtopic. Rather than only doing this once and ending up really strong in one and weaker in others.
If you would like to learn more about making a revision timetable, have a look at this Think Student article .
Use flashcards
Flashcards are an age-old revision method to the extent that some students wonder if they even work at all. However, especially for A-Level History, flashcards are a great revision method.
This is because they force you to condense all the information, facts and details about a certain event, key figure or whatever else into a small card. When made correctly, these flashcards will give you all the key details but in a short enough form that it’s easy to retain. To learn how to make good flashcards, have a look at this Think Student article .
Using flashcards to revise isn’t actually just about the flashcards themselves, but also about how you use them. There are many different ways of using flashcards in your revision, such as through spaced repetition, getting someone to test you with them and even through playing games.
For some ideas on how to use flashcards in your revision, have a look at this Think Student article .
Use timelines
For A-Level History, dates and key facts are so, so important. Therefore, using timelines can be a great way to categorise all of your knowledge from a unit in chronological order. This can especially be great to help you get a better idea of the unit overall as well as help you remember specific key dates and see the dates of turning points.
Rather than writing all the information out into massive timeline, I would recommend using flashcards or post-it-notes to fill in the events and their details and then put the years/ months on a separate page or with clearly marked flashcards/ post-it-notes.
Make essay plans
Once you’ve got the bulk of the information revised, you can move onto putting this revision into practise and revising the actual exam. Rather than going straight in by doing loads and loads of essay questions, first, you should plan them.
An ideal essay plan will have your overall line of argument, the points of each paragraph, the information you’re going to include and maybe even the judgement for each paragraph. However, in an actual exam, you don’t actually have that much time to make this solid essay plan.
However, when you’re revising, you do.
There are only a certain number of specific topics that can actually come up for each question, especially as they tend to give you several choices of question, although this may depend on the exam board. Therefore, try planning all the past paper questions that you can get your hands on, in full detail.
This won’t only help you to have arguments already planned out that you can then memorise, even if just briefly, to use in the exams. It can also help to give you greater clarity on the structure of essay plans and essays themselves, which will help you when it comes to the exam when you need to come up with the essay and its structure from scratch.
You may even want to try timing yourself, giving yourself only 10 minutes or even just 5 to come up with the essay plan. Mimicking exam conditions like this, can help to make you quicker at essay planning, especially with coming up with structure and line of argument, both of which are crucial in exams, in the actual exams.
You can learn more about what is assessed in the A-Level History exams by having a look at this page on the OCR website.
Practise essay questions
Practising essay questions is another staple revision method, in fact it’s probably the most important thing you can do when revising for A-Level History. This is because regardless of exam board, all the questions in the A-Level History exams are essays, although with different weightings.
The first thing you need to make sure you’re doing in this revision is writing in timed conditions. You could write a wonderful essay, but if it’s taking much longer than you have in the exam it doesn’t matter because you will never have the time to write anything like it in the exam.
If writing a whole essay feels a bit too much, you could always just try to do parts of it. Maybe just one paragraph, the introduction and/ or conclusion, depending on which sections of an essay you feel that you need to work on most.
Plus, if you plan to also revise using essay plans, you could always use these full essay plans while writing an essay in timed conditions. You could even use this to help track your progress by using a very detailed essay plan at the start of your revision and gradually using less detailed ones until you end up not using a previously made essay plan at all.
Analyse sources and interpretations
Another crucial part of your A-Level History revision is analysing sources and interpretations as these will be the focus of certain questions in your exams. Source and interpretation-focused questions aren’t quite like the other essay questions on your papers and while they do still come under the umbrella of essay questions, they’re not quite the same.
The main issue with source and interpretation questions is that you can’t even remotely plan them in advance, unlike for theme or key figure focused questions. In those questions, the main ideas repeat and tend to be vague enough that one essay plan could apply to several different questions.
However, for source and interpretation questions, the combination of sources and historian interpretations they use is unlikely to be even remotely same. In fact, they could potentially say completely different things to each other, making it far too difficult to plan for.
Therefore, you need to practise analysing these sources and interpretations when you have the time to do so. This is in order to figure out the best features to pick out, the best information to link these to and even how you’re supposed to evaluate these sources.
Once again, doing this in timed conditions can be a great idea to allow you to properly access this revision in the exam.
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