When learners struggle with literacy at secondary school, they take those challenges with them into every subject they study. For these students to reach their full academic potential, they need supports that can be adapted to each area of study.

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the specific challenges that come with Geography lessons and assessments, and how DocsPlus can be used to help learners overcome them.

Acquiring new topic vocabulary

Acquiring new vocabulary is a common challenge for learners at secondary school. According to recent reports, almost half of all secondary teachers feel their students lack confidence in using general academic vocabulary.

This process can be especially difficult in a subject like Geography that uses lots of tricky Tier 3 words that students are unlikely to encounter outside of the lesson.

So how can we encourage students to start using words like migration, supercontinent, and photochemical in lessons?

Our Customer Experience Consultant, Katy, recently hosted a webinar: DocsPlus & academic language. Here are some of the key takeaways, and how they can apply to Geography.

Make reading accessible

Coming across an unfamiliar word when reading classroom texts can be quite intimidating for learners who have trouble with reading and writing. So, it’s important to make reading materials accessible and give students a chance to decode at their own pace.

You can upload any texts saved as a PDF or DOCX file into the DocReader. This enables students to have the words read aloud to them in a clear, realistic voice. Your learners can go back to any words or passages they want to hear again, as many times as needed. This gives them a chance to process the meaning of the text, at their own pace.

Collect vocabulary

Another important step is to give students a way to collect the subject-specific vocabulary they need to help solidify their understanding. This is where WorkSpaces can be particularly effective.

WorkSpace is a customisable visual planning tool. Before introducing a new topic or starting a writing task, learners can gather the words they will need to know into a WorkSpace. You can use this either as a solo activity or as a whole-class activity to embed the words and ensure that students can refer to them later.

You can find plenty of pre-made options on LearningGrids, our bank of curriculum resources. Plus, they are easy to edit as needed, and you can create your own WorkSpace from scratch if you need something more specific.

For example, this WorkSpace helps learners solidify their understanding of different types of drought.

And you can adapt this glossary resource to whichever topic you're working on by simply editing the text in the cells on the left.

Prompt learners to use topic vocabulary

In addition to helping students acquire vocabulary, DocsPlus can also support them by providing prompts and reminders to use these words in their written work.

Once a student has collected vocabulary in their WorkSpace, they can send it as an image to their Document as a visual reminder to use the words they gathered. They can also convert their WorkSpace into a Wordbar to further support their writing.

Wordbars give learners point-and-click access to subject-specific vocabulary and allow them to easily add tricky words into their tasks, without spelling or memory challenges getting in the way.

The Predictor is another great tool to prompt learners to use important vocabulary. The tool predicts the next word in the sentence based on what the student is writing. This can be especially helpful for topics like Geography with lots of subject-specific vocabulary, as it will prioritise any words in open Wordbars. Your learners will receive subject-specific suggestions, which will give them an opportunity to think critically about their word choices as they assess which option is most appropriate for their writing.

Reducing demands on cognitive load

When studying Geography, students have to process lots of complex information and concepts. From understanding the process of coastal erosion, to memorising facts and figures about population change, the subject can be quite cognitively demanding.

Cognitive load theory is the idea that our working or short-term memory can only deal with a limited amount of information at any one time. Too much and the result, according to educational psychologist John Sweller, is “cognitive overload”.

A key strategy to manage cognitive load when learning new things is to activate prior knowledge before starting work on new learning, encouraging students to pull what they have previously learned (from their long-term memory) into their working (short-term) memory.

DocsPlus provides some quick and simple retrieval activities that are designed to do just that.

Cloze activities

Cloze activities are simple ‘fill in the gap’ exercises that you can use to test understanding of any topic you're working on. They are simple to make and give students an opportunity to practise retrieval of key concepts.

For example, if you have taught a concept such as the Clark Fisher model of economic development, you can assign a Cloze activity on the topic to check understanding and identify any gaps, before moving on to applying the model to different countries you may be focussing on in the term.

WorkSpace

You can also use WorkSpaces as retrieval exercises. In the example below, the activity challenges the learner to remember each stage of glacier formation, as well as the correct order.

Writing and structuring extended responses

Another challenge students encounter with a subject like Geography is showing what they know in extended responses.

Our Customer Experience Consultant, Melissa, recently covered this topic in her webinar: Writing and structuring extended pieces of writing for Geography.

The session outlines the ways that the range of support tools in DocsPlus can break down the task of writing extended responses and allow students to work effectively.

Here are some of her insights:

Support the transition from planning to writing

Much like the process of collecting key words, students can also plan their responses in a WorkSpace and add it into the Document as an image or convert it into a custom Wordbar to help them remember all the ideas they want to include.

Since WorkSpaces are customisable, learners can arrange their plans in whatever way helps them the most. If they are writing an answer that requires them to make arguments for or against a proposition, for instance, they can separate their ideas into ‘for’ and ‘against’ tabs, or they can designate a tab for each paragraph they plan to write. When they convert their plan into a Wordbar, they can select ‘use all tabs’ to ensure that it follows the same format.

Writing frames and planners

If your learners need prompting to follow a specific structure, there are dedicated resources available on LearningGrids that can help. 

This includes open-ended resources in the Writing Frames & Planners category that can be used for any topic a learner needs to write about.

For example, the Essay Planner WorkSpace prompts learners to follow a clear and effective structure when forming their answers.

You can also find Geography-specific writing frames and planners in the Geographical Enquiry category.

If, for example, students need to write an extended response that compares two countries, they can use the Comparing Countries WorkSpace, alongside the matching Wordbar to remind them to cover each key element, and to use language that makes it clear they are hitting assessment objectives.

To learn more about how DocsPlus can be used to support specific subjects, explore these blog posts:

• Writing frames and planners for History: DocsPlus resources
  
  
• Using DocsPlus in English Language: Creative writing
  
  
• How to use DocsPlus in a model lesson: English Literature