Let's play Supermarket ‘Evidential' Sweep: developing students' awareness of the need to select evidence

Despite having built a sustained focus on historical thinking into their planning for progression across Years 7 to 13, Rachel Foster and Sarah Gadd remained frustrated with stubborn weaknesses in the evidential thinking of students in examination classes. Students slipped too easily into grabbing any fact or source extract as evidence, and failed to think hard about what constituted evidence in the first place, about the strength of the claim that they could advance on the basis of that evidence and about criteria for such choices. Traditional guidance on paragraph structuring such as ‘P.E.E.' or ‘P.E.G.E.X.' seemed not only inadequate but part of the problem. In order to address the problem, Foster and Gadd devised an ingenious plan. Goodbye P.E.E. and hello shopping trolleys...