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GSCE History - severely behind, priorities?

Hiya!
Because of severe teacher absence, my replacement teacher not being great and also because of personal mental health struggles, im really very behind on gcse history. i got a 3 in my mock, compared to grade 6-9 in everything else (but tbf, only about 3 people in my school passed :0). im doing:

american west - know p much nothing
elizabethan - very little
medicine - not much but some
wiemar germany - quite a lot

i also heavily struggle with how to actually answer the questions!

i was wondering if anyone who has already done gcses or someone who knows about all these topics could advise me on the most important areas of each to try and teach myself about!! :smile:

Reply 1

shaw867

For exam technique there are similar questions in medicine and weimar germany. Possibly in Elizabethan but I don't study that. AW focuses really heavily on consequences which i find really difficult to answer. If you do focus on medicine or germany you should be able to improve exam skills for 2 or 3 / 4. I hope this made sense!

Reply 2

LightHades

i do elizabeth and weimar germany. the best thing to do, imo, would be learn a couple of key facts per topic. e.g. for elizabeth, in gov, you need to know about parliament and the privy coucil. so learn a few things on each. do this for each topic. you don't have to learn everything, just key facts. that way, you have evidence for any question they give you; otherwise you may end up in a situation where something you havent revised at all comes up in the last 16 marker. to get all the detail, if you're missing any, i'd ask your history department to borrow textbooks and fill in any gaps. in terms of the questions, you have to ask your teacher to run through the structures. there's so many types of questions and almost all of them have a different structure. as a general rule of thumb, PEEL paragraphs are the way to go - how many you should do, you can estimate from the number of marks. however, a PEEL structure wouldn't work on source/interpretation questions - which are a big part of the exams. you need to ask your teacher about how to approach these. you can also check the markscheme to get an idea of what they want for the higher bands. key reminder: conclusions are super important for a lot of questions, if in doubt, put a little conclusion in - otherwise it could cap your mark!