Starting A-level Chemistry? Why the A-level Chemistry Specification is your new best friend...

Graham is an experienced Chemistry teacher with over 15 years of teaching experience across all key stages, plus industrial experience with a multi-national pharmaceutical company. With a particular passion for A-level Chemistry, especially organic chemistry and  has tutored over 50 students 1:1. Here, he shares the specification "traffic light" method he uses with every student to track understanding and structure revision.

Starting A-level Chemistry?  Why the A-level Chemistry Specification is your new best friend…

By Tutor Graham | Chemistry Specialist| Sherpa Tutor

Stick with me on this one! It might not be the most entertaining of documents (I’m not sure that in 20 years of teaching A-level Chemistry, it has ever made me laugh, told me an interesting story, or taken me for a coffee), but it is arguably the most important when it comes to studying A-level Chemistry.

The reason is that it contains all the content you will need for your upcoming studies. Now, that doesn’t mean you can just learn all the words within it and then repeat them to get full marks in the exam. However, it will provide a framework for the work you cover in your lessons and homework, and when revising for tests.

As a tutor, how do you use the specification?

I will send out a link to the specification for the student’s exam board. They will then “traffic light” each of the sections of the course, depending on how confident they feel about the topics within.

As an example, when I review this for a particular student, it tells me that they understand the early principles of calculating pH (highlighted green) but feel less confident about making buffers and their calculations (highlighted red). When planning a lesson on this, I would have a couple of quick questions just to check that their pH calculations are accurate, and then dedicate much more lesson time to questions on buffers. I then repeat this in subsequent lessons for other topics, and I also encourage the student to keep revisiting the annotated specification over the following weeks and months to check how their understanding is improving (hopefully moving those red sections to green!).

As a new A-level Chemistry student, how can I use the specification to help me?

You may be given a copy of the specification by your teacher, or it can be found for your exam board online. As you finish each topic, check back and annotate it to keep track of how you found each part of the course. The pace is fast at A-level Chemistry especially if you're transitioning from GCSE Chemistry, and it is really important that you stay on top of things - if you found a topic tough, then make sure you make a note of it and keep coming back to it. Don’t ignore it and hope it will go away; you will have to answer questions on the whole course eventually…

The most effective use I have seen was by a Year 13 student revising for the final A-level exams, who had divided up the specification into topics, and, after each page, had revision notes, relevant homework tasks, and past paper questions for this part of the course. This enabled them to check they had covered everything in enough detail and to identify any weak areas. Great to see!

You may well develop your own way of using the specification to help your learning, but this is the best method I have found to track things. Learning to self-assess your understanding is a key skill at A-level and beyond, and using the specification to do this is a great way to make sure nothing slips through the net.

Learning to use it effectively will really help you structure your studies for the next two years and help organise your understanding of A-level Chemistry. As an added bonus, you will get really good at using a highlighter!