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Study hints

To a large extent the study skills you need in Geography are the same as those you need in the other HSC subjects you have chosen. What is important to remember is that you learn skills by practising them rather than reading about them! The key is to practise--practise--practise.

The one study skills area that is distinctive to Geography is the ability to use the geographical tools & skills listed on pages 16-17 of the syllabus. Otherwise you will find that if you go to the HSC home page and click on Study and Exams you will find lots of material on study strategies, examination techniques and references on study skills.

Here's a summary or overview of the skills you need to practise.

• Geographical tools & skills ( Syllabus pages 16-17)

Section I, and maybe parts of Section II, of the external examination are devoted to testing your mastery of these tools and skills, so it is worth spending a substantial amount of time practising them. There are textbooks available that you can use as a study guide e.g.

Baker, S. et al. (1996). Pathways in Senior Geography: Essential Skills. Nelson: Melbourne.
Harte, J. & Dunbar, C. (1994). Skills in Geography. Cambridge University Press: Melbourne.
Kleeman, G. (1995). Topographic Mapping Skills for Secondary Students. Hodder Education: Sydney.

You can download previous HSC Geography examination papers from the Board of Studies web site and attempt the skills question on each paper. You can also check the marking guidelines. For more detail ask your teacher about the HSC Standards Package for Geography.

Past exams will not necessarily be a good guide to questions that will be asked in 2001 and in later years, and this is especially true of the questions in Sections II and III. You are studying a new syllabus and the exam papers up to and including the HSC examinations in 2000 tested a previous and different syllabus.

A further point about the geographical tools & skills is that you should be clear about the fieldwork skills you have been learning and applying both in your SGP in Year 11 and in other parts of your Geography course. There could be an examination question on fieldwork skills.

• Information searching

Whether you are searching for information on geography topics in your textbook, on the Internet, or from the media etc., it is important to identify key words to make the search easier and efficient. These key words are the main concepts or main ideas around which the three HSC topics are organised. You should have an understanding of how these main ideas fit together in each topic, maybe by drawing a diagram or mind-map.

• Reading

You will probably have a large volume of material to read, either in print or on screen. Two bits of advice are useful here (and you can follow this up by going to the Study & Exams button. One is to first of all skim-read the material to see what it is generally about and how relevant it is to you. The second is to then go back and re-read more carefully, with some questions in mind that you want the reading to answer related to the Geography HSC course outcomes. This more active approach to reading is likely to be more interesting and more useful than the passive approach of sitting back and letting the words wash over you in the hope that they will stick.

• Essay writing

You will be receiving lots of advice about practising your essay writing skills in order to handle the extended response questions in Section III of the external exam. Following are one or two points you may want to bear in mind, and these apply to both assessment tasks you compete at school and the extended responses you write in the exam:

1. Make sure your extended response directly answers or addresses the question that has been set.

2. Take time to organise your thoughts and express them clearly. You are writing for an audience, i.e. the reader, and s/he will thank you for producing something that is reader-friendly!
   
   One way of doing this is to work out what you regard as the main points to be made in answering the question. Often you can identify say between four and eight major and different points. Summarise each one of these points as a single sentence; sometimes this can be quite a long sentence. Each sentence then becomes the first sentence of a whole paragraph (a paragraph is a "unit of thought" and is likely to be a half page or so long), which explains in further detail what you mean by that first sentence. Everything you want to say about that point should be put in that paragraph. If you do that for each major point that you want to make, you will have an extended response of several substantial paragraphs with each paragraph starting with the point you want to emphasise. There is often a temptation to put the major point in the last sentence of the paragraph, but if you do, then there is a chance that the reader will miss it!
   
   After writing a draft of these big paragraphs, you can go back and write a brief introduction of 2 or 3 sentences which simply says what the essay is about, list the main points that will be covered and basically provide the reader with a quick overview of what to expect (this is a sort of "signpost" introduction). You finish up by summarising the conclusions in the final paragraph.

3. Practise writing "good geography". You can do this by:
   • making appropriate use of illustrative material such as explanatory maps, diagrams and figures in your extended response
   • making appropriate references in your answers to contemporary issues, fieldwork and geographic skills-- referred to in the syllabus as Geographical Inquiry Methodologies
   • drawing appropriately on what you learnt from your Senior Geography Project (SGP). The SGP is not externally examined but you can use the knowledge and skills that you learnt from it to illustrate your answers and extended responses, where appropriate
   • providing an answer or extended response that balances different viewpoints and perspectives. You should substantiate your arguments with appropriate evidence, such as case study examples, and avoid sweeping false generalisations.
     
4. Take time to analyse what each question requires by highlighting the key words. Pay attention to the "directive" terms which are used and the different meanings of the different terms. A glossary of assessment terms has been provided on this site.