Exam Review with KTL

Exam Review with KTL

By: Emily Bularzik

BHS- English

My favorite way to help students study for midyear and final exams is study stations. I set up eight to ten stations around the room, let students choose four to five stations they want to visit, and have students switch stations every ten minutes or so. For classes that need more structure, I set up fewer stations and have students rotate through all of them in assigned groups.

Study stations work well because they give students choice and variety. They also require students to decide what they personally need to work on, and students tend to appreciate this independence. My stations are never all KTL (I like including a “locate all your notes” station, for example), but many of them are. Here are a few of my favorites:

Categorizing

Give students a list of some or all of the key terms that will be on the exam. Have students develop categories and sort the terms. Students could also sort terms by how well they know them and then write down the terms they need to study most.


Top-Down Webs

Have students turn a list of key terms and concepts into a top-down web.

Have students use their own notes, handouts, etc. to develop a top-down web for all the material covered throughout the semester.

Rewrite your exam review guide as a partially completed top-down web to help students see the relationships between concepts.


Two-Column Notes

Rewrite your exam review guide as a partially completed two-column notes chart.

Have students condense their notes from the unit into a new set of two-column notes covering the most important ideas.


Summary Writing

Assign different groups of students to summarize different units or key concepts. Share these as a class resource.


Bloom’s Taxonomy

Using all levels of Bloom’s, have students create questions they might expect to see on the exam.

After groups create sets of questions, have them trade their questions with another group and answer them.

Have students create sets of Bloom’s Taxonomy questions and put them in different boxes according to their level. Use these questions for a review game, using different levels of questions for different activities or tasks.