How to Maximise Marks in Health and Movement Science

Your  Health and Movement Science  students know the content.

They can recall it. They can talk about it. They hand in work that looks like they understand it.

So why are they still losing marks?

This is the question that comes up again and again from Health and Movement Science teachers across NSW right now. Trials are here. Year 11 yearly exams and the HSC are coming. And there is a particular kind of pressure that sits over a course nobody has taken to the HSC many times before.

Here is what I want you to hear first.

The expectations have not changed. Marking has not changed in 22 years. The HSC markers who have marked those papers for the last two decades are still marking at the same standard.

We have new content to deal with. 

So the mistakes students are making in Health and Movement Science are not new mistakes. They are the same mistakes I watched play out across more than 40,000 student responses in 16 years of HSC marking. Same patterns. Different course name.

There are three of them.

1. The content is too surface level

We rush. We think we have to.

Year 11Health and Movement Science is jam-packed and teachers are telling me they scraped through and did not finish. So the instinct is to move faster. Cover more. Get through it.

But skimming across the top of the content is exactly what leaves students with disjointed, general answers in an exam.

We need to go wide and we need to go deep.

• Slow down in Year 11 and be strategic about content that links to Year 12 concepts
• Stop having students copy every dot point off the board. Give them booklets or slides instead
• Use the lesson time you win back for application, not regurgitating content 
• Open up the four walls. Bring in a physio, an exercise scientist or a guest speaker on Zoom

You do not need to overhaul your program. You need to trade some of the coverage for depth.

2. Students are not addressing the Glossary of Key Words

This is the one I could talk about all day.

I used to print the Glossary of Key Words and stick them across the back wall of my classroom. Bright pink. Laminated. I genuinely thought that if my students could recall the definitions, they knew the words.

They did not. Because I had never shown them what those words actually look like in a response.

I did not know either. Not until I sat in a marking centre.

If the verb is not addressed, students cannot access the top of the range. A five mark question where they dump content and never compare might get three. An eight mark question with lovely content but no discussion might get five.

That is not a knowledge problem. That is students selling themselves short.

• Teach the verbs explicitly alongside the content, not as a revision activity in Term 3
• Show students how the same content changes when the verb changes from explain to discuss to compare to evaluate
• Give them the language. Comparative expressions like similarly and in comparison to do real work in a response
• Correct the PEEL myth. The E is elaborate, not explain. Students should not be explaining in a discuss question
• Put the glossary term somewhere explicit in the paragraph, whether that is after the elaboration or after the example

Be careful with what is circulating right now. There are resources online and in print telling students to explain in every question. That is a bum steer and it will cost them marks.

3. The examples are too basic

There are around 18,000 students sitting this course across NSW.

If your students are using the same example that appeared in the textbook, they are using the same example as thousands of other students.

We want markers to look up and think, these students know their stuff.

That is what SUAVE is for.

• Specific
• Unique
• Applied to the question
• Varied
• Explicit in the link back to what the question is asking

Treat the textbook example as base level. Then ask your class what else. What is a second example? What is a third? What would nobody else in the state be writing about?

One more thing worth saying out loud

Nobody knows what a Band 6 looks like in Health and Movement Science yet.

The course has not been through an HSC. No responses have been judged. No typical Band 6 has been determined.

I bought a resource recently that promised a pathway to a Band 6 in HMS. Some of the strategies inside it were good. Some of the information was simply incorrect and the responses held up as full marks would not have earned full marks in a marking centre.

Please be mindful about what you are putting in front of your students right now. Ask where it came from and who wrote it.

Why this matters

None of this is about working harder. You are already working hard enough.

It is about spending your energy on the things that actually move a mark. Depth over coverage. Verbs taught explicitly. Examples that stand out.

The content will get your students part way there. The skills take them the rest of the way.

You are not doing this alone. Every Health and Movement Science teacher in NSW is figuring this out at the same time, from the same syllabus, in the same boat. The gatekeeping needs to stop and the collaborating needs to start.

Listen to the full episode here: thelearnnet.com/184

And if you want resources that match the depth this course is demanding, including sample answers, scaffolds and Glossary of Key Words activities, come and join us inside the HMS Membership: thelearnnet.com/hms