A student guide with some worksheet material, designed to develop essay-writing skills with GCSE / IGCSE History students.

A step-by-step guide providing students with different strategies for approaching “describe, explain, assess” questions in the GCSE / IGCSE History examination.

A teacher’s mark scheme, student advice and some practice exercises for developing history essay writing skills.

After marking my students’ IGCSE History mock exam answers, I put together this feedback session which I think they got a lot out of – basically, I wrote a whole raft of responses based around the describe / explain / assess format, and then students had to mark each response using a generic markscheme. It made some interesting points – e.g. that the longest answers aren’t always the best, that narrative needs to serve analysis, and so on.

This new page, using examples of student work from the International School of Toulouse, consists of a list of past paper questions, and examples of the ways in which students are able to challenge the “loaded assumptions” within them. These examples are taken from the IB History examination but the principle can be applied to A-Level equally well.

New questions from 2006 Paper 1, 2 and 3 added to IB History.