Emma

You facilitate over a dozen workshops and ThinkIns a year, working with hundreds of physics teachers worldwide. What's your top tip for DP physics teachers?

Tim

Great question, but it’s so hard to limit myself to one. I’ll start by focusing on lesson preparation and the next one will have to do with lesson delivery.

As far as the lesson content is concerned, the go-to resource is, of course, the Physics Subject Guide. The structure of the Physics Subject Guide is very similar to all the other DP guides: 

• The first section covers things like the nature of the subject along with aims, assessment objectives etc.
• The central section specifies what’s in the syllabus and what isn’t there, and...
• The final section covers the details of how students are going to be assessed and the criteria to be used in the Internal Assessment.

In my experience, most teachers never really read the whole subject guide. Everybody jumps to the middle section to see what they need to include in their lessons. This is not a great approach as it misses out the connection between the aims and objectives (in the introduction) AND the assessment techniques that are going to be used to grade your students.

So what are the actual aims of the DP Physics course? Obviously to learn some Physics knowledge, but what else? In many of my workshops, I get delegates to try and think what they think the aims should be - so before reading on, two questions: 

• How many aims do you think the current syllabus has?
• Have the aims significantly changed from the previous syllabus?

The table below compares the 2016 and 2025 syllabus - identical aims are colour-coded.

What does this all mean? In my opinion, we have:

1. No significant change in the aims of the course - still framed by Nature of Science.
2. A drop from 10 aims in 2016 to 9 aims in 2025 is a result of tidying “acquire a body of knowledge…” and “apply.. a body of knowledge…” into “acquire and apply a body of knowledge…”.
3. The phrase “.. and technology” being dropped from many statements in the 2016 syllabus. This is fair enough as it’s a Physics exam, not a technology one.
4. The 2025 syllabus placing emphasis on drawing out the conceptual understanding and linking this across different areas of the course.
5. Aim 4 now specifically highlights that over the two years we are trying to build up students’ resilience and ability to approach unfamiliar situations.
6. Creativity is centrestage in terms of designing and modelling solutions. 

All great aims but remember the aims of the course are different to the assessment objectives - the things that the students are going to be tested on. For example we might want to build up students’ resilience but it would be horrible to go out of our way to test that in an exam!

The assessment objectives are also in the first third of the guide: 

This adds up to :

1. There is no significant change in assessment objects - the difficulty of questions in this syllabus is going to be the same as the previous syllabus.
2. The four aims are essentially hierarchical - getting harder as you go down the list. AO1 is easier to achieve than AO3. They are clearly linked to Bloom’s taxonomy. 
3. AO1 is about knowing stuff - e.g. can you remember that F = ma?
4. AO2 is about applying knowledge in familiar situations - e.g. if I give you m and a, can you calculate F?
5. AO3 is about problem-solving - e.g. if I give you m, a and the cross-sectional area, A, can you work out the pressure? This is a two-stage solution to a problem.
6. AO4 brings all of them together to see a physics investigation through.

So what balance between the assessment objectives should the students expect in the written exam? Again, before reading on, you might want to think about what balance you think would be fair.

Here is the analysis:

This says:

• Half of the marks in every exam that students sit will be focused on AO3 - the hardest of the assessment objectives.
• The good news is that students aren’t expected to be able to solve all the problems that are put in front of them. Typically you can get nearly a third of the paper wrong and still get a 7!

All of the above has significant implications for students’ revision programmes. What most students do the night before the exam is to focus on the easy memory stuff targeted by AO1 questions. What they actually should be doing is reminding themselves of the different problem-solving skills and techniques that they could use if they get stuck with a question.

How does a student know which AO is being targeted? The answer to this is in the final section of the syllabus. The appendix lists the command terms that are going to be used in the written papers. For example, a question that begins “Determine…” will be an AO3 question so expect a two- or more-stage problem involving significant problem-solving skills. A question that begins “Calculate…” should be a straightforward application of a known relationship. Finally, a question that starts “State…” should be straight-forward factual recall.

So what’s the top tip? Read all of the subject guide in detail, look for connections between what is being learned and what is being assessed. Then pass on your findings to your students.

Emma

That was quite the response! Thanks, Tim.