All you need is SPEEDL

AO1 is the assessment objective that focuses on showing what you know and understand. We can summarise what you need to do to meet AO1 as ‘Tell me about x.’ So, if I replace x with the words ‘a biro pen’, we can understand this on a deeper and more insightful level. Now, if you needed to tell someone about a biro, you would, logically, start with the basic information, or what you first see or remember: it’s plastic, longish, thinnish, has two different ends, and one end can be written with. This is the immediate information. It’s the key information and basic, and is similar to repetition of something memorised — you don’t need to hold a biro to tell someone this information.

At the top level, all exam boards’ assessment criteria in the mark schemes want a thorough or comprehensive exposition of x to meet AO1. Thus, in our pen example, we would need to go well beyond the basic information above. So how can I do that? Well, I need to add more information about the pen. Logically, the best way to do this is to look again at the pen and look more closely, preferably at an actual example. When I look at it now, I might notice this particular biro’s hexagonal shape, that this particular pen is blue, that the plastic bit at the top has been chewed and that it has the word ‘biro’ written on the body. This information is related to the actual pen in my hand, rather than all biros, as the basic information was.