Health and Movement Science Exam Marks: Same Content, Different Verb

Your Health and Movement Science student can define stroke volume. They can list the principles of training. They can talk you through every dot point in the focus area.

And they still come back with a four out of six.

This week on The PDHPE & CAFS Podcast I unpacked why that keeps happening and it is almost never a content problem. It is the verb.

The word at the front of the question changes everything

Assess is not analyse. Explain is not discuss. Evaluate is not describe.

Every one of those words is a “doing word”. It tells the student what job to perform with the content they already have. Change the verb and you change the structure, the thinking and the mark.

Here is the example I ran at the HMS Summit last week.

• Explain how the principle of specificity is applied in the training program of a marathon runner and a powerlifter.
• Discuss how the principle of specificity is applied in the training program of a marathon runner and a powerlifter.

Same principle of training. Same focus area. Completely different response.

Explain is cause and effect. Here is the cause, here is the effect, here is the impact.

Discuss is a three-part job. Point out the issues, show the points for and against, then show the implications.

If a student explains their way through a discuss question, they stop about halfway. On a six mark question that is two crucial marks gone and it had nothing to do with what they knew.

Why this matters more in 2026 than ever

2026 is the first HSC under the new Health and Movement Science syllabus. There is a sample paper from NESA. There is no past paper bank to benchmark against.

Which means the Glossary of Key Words is the clearest signal your students have about what a marker wants from them. It is the one thing that has not changed.

The three steps

1. Differentiate the words for yourself first

You cannot teach a difference you have not seen.

• Sit with explain, assess, examine, justify, discuss, compare, contrast, evaluate, to what extent and analyse
• Name what each one actually asks a student to do, not what it means in a dictionary
• Notice the ones your students blur together, because those are the two confusions costing marks in every focus area

Teachers at The HMS Summit with twenty years of experience told me nobody had ever shown them this. That is not a reflection on them. It is a gap in how we have supported Stage 6 teachers.

2. Model it in class

Definitions on the wall are not teaching.

I know this one personally. In 2006 I laminated every Glossary of Key Word in fluoro pink and stuck them across the back of my classroom. My students could recite them. Not one of them could apply them in a response.

• Show a worked response for explain, then the same content written for assess
• Break down the step-by-step structure of each word
• Give students the sentence language that signals to a marker which job they are doing

3. Recognise it in a student response

This is the hardest one and it took me the longest.

• Scan a response and ask one question. Has this student done the verb, or have they written everything they know and hoped?
• Mark against the key word before you mark against content
• Give feedback that names the verb, not just the missing information

Two things quietly making this worse

The first E in PEEL is elaborate. Not explain.

I saw a resource from a reputable publisher this week teaching it as explain and it frustrated me. Explain is a specific verb with a specific structure. When we use it as a generic paragraph step, students carry that confusion straight into the exam.

And ALARM. ALARM is genuinely useful for showing a progression of thinking. It does not mean a student has to work through every rung of the ladder before they discuss or analyse. If we teach it that way, no wonder they are confused.

One more thing

Please do not use AI to write your HSC style questions and sample responses.

Teachers at The HMS Summit admitted they had been doing it. AI does not know the Glossary of Key Words. It will give your students a bum steer and it will generate answers that look right and are not.

Write them yourself. Use the resources built by people who have marked these papers. Aka us!

I am running a free HMS webinar on Thursday 6 August where I will show you exactly what these key words look like in a student response. One hour, live and you can ask me anything: thelearnnet.com/marks

Want the Glossary of Key Words posters and the RUN FAR strategy? Grab them free at thelearnnet.com/maximise

And if you want the scaffolds, templates and marked exemplars to teach this properly across your whole program, The HMS Membership is where that lives: thelearnnet.com/hms