Developing Analysis Skills

Dear Colleagues,

I hope this email finds you well.  A quick suggestions for a starter activity to help students make connections between topics.  This is particular useful for developing our students analysis skills.

Can You Connect is a starter activity designed to develop students analysis skills (key exam skill).

Can You Connect involves giving students 4 or 5 key concepts and asking students if they can connect each one.

It is ideal for those students who struggle to make steps in their answer and therefore miss out on achieving good analysis.

So, a typical Can You Connect activity might involve the following being written on the board as the students enter the classroom:

Can You Connect:

· Labour Productivity
· Unit Costs
· Price
· Price Elasticity of Demand

Here, we can see we have a people concept, an operations concept and two marketing concepts. The challenge is for my students to connect these 4 areas.

'An increase in labour productivity can result in reduced unit costs because............... A reduction in unit costs could therefore allow the business to reduce its price, enabling the business to become more competitive. However, the decision to reduce the price would depend on the products price elasticity of demand etc.

The 4 concepts act as a scaffold allowing students to make links and develop good lines of analysis. You could even provide a 5th concept, profit, therefore introducing a finance topic.

You may also wish to differentiate by asking students to make 2, 3 or 4 connections or even have two different examples on the board as ask students to tackle a more obvious one first before then moving on to the second.

Any suggestions, successes or improvements please comment on the blog or send me an email.

Have a great weekend.

Neil

Credit: www.tutor2u.net