Schools

Our students and staff have been using my-GCSEscience videos since they were first published. They annually play a role in our flipped learning, interleaving and retrieval practice in both our Year 10 and Year 11 schemes of work.

The students value the fact that the content that they have studied in school is summarised in short videos accompanied by relevant exam questions. These serve as useful learning checks for both students and staff.

We believe that my-GCSEscience helps to support our students through the two years of GCSE to their successful completion.

Over the last three school years, feedback from our students has been consistently positive. my-GCSEscience has provided an engaging and motivating revision resource for them and we have no doubt that students of wide-ranging abilities have seen a boost to their GCSE grades as a result of using it.

Being able to track and plan a personalised, effective revision programme has proven to be a superb feature that really nurtures the skills students need to become successful independent learners in the longer term. That’s a real bonus.

The massive improvement in the school’s GCSE Science results can be attributed, in part, to this online resource that encourages independent learning and revision and flipped learning in the science classroom.

It was the students of Bishop Thomas Grant that told us, their teachers, about my-GCSEscience and this made me sit up and take notice. A one- stop shop for all the specification points of the AQA syllabus seemed too good to be true, but it wasn’t. Immediately I knew that we were on to something that was going to revolutionise the way students learn and teachers teach (and I use the term ‘revolutionise’ confidently).

Now, for the first time, staff and students have a set of succinct, video tutorials taught by someone with experience of the specification, assessment requirements and, crucially, the classroom too. Classroom teachers use the online resources in a variety of ways from tasking students to watch and take notes from the video clips in advance of a lesson, during a lesson or proceeding a lesson or an assessment. The assessment questions inform students if it is time to move on or to review the video or notes again until they have it right.

The author understands how students learn and its impact is tangible with 85% of our students attaining A*-A in Biology and Physics and 100% of our students attaining A*-A in Chemistry this year. The percentage of A*-C grades at Core Science also increased by 10% from 2014 to 78% and for Additional Science it was an increase of 31% to 92%.

I believe that my-GCSEscience has had a huge part to play in this success and recommend it to every Head of Science.

Both students and my team found my-GCSEscience.com extremely useful last year. The science department made use of it for research homework tasks and lesson preparation so that students would come to lessons with knowledge of the content for a unit.

We found we could really build upon this learning and focus on stretching and challenging students to apply and develop their theoretical knowledge in a range of contexts. On top of this, the students found my-GCSEscience really useful when revising as they could pause and re-watch sections of content to either make notes or simply reinforce the concepts in their mind.

Because of the department’s effective use of the site, we saw a huge jump in the number of A*-A grades this year with a whopping 32% of all GCSEs attained in Science at either an A or A*, double the percentage of the previous year! my-GCSEscience was a really well-received intervention strategy that we have repeated across the whole cohort this year.