More GCSE Sociology Revision Stuff

While it’s possible to put-together a very reasonable – and reasonably comprehensive – set of revision resources from stuff that teachers have put on the web, there are a couple of things you should do before committing yourself to using these materials:

1. Check they are for your Specification – you don’t want to be revising the wrong Spec.

2. Check the Specification year / series to which they refer, particularly if it’s changed recently (over the past year or so). In other words, check the resources cover the newer required material and exclude older, newly-irrelevant material, from your revision.

Guides

These comprehensive resources combine things like notes, activities and advice and generally cover a number of different areas of the GCSE Specification. Three I’ve found are worth a look:

1. Whole Course Revision 2018: This is a serious, 100-page, GCSE Revision Guide, put together by Ian Goddard, that covers:

• Introducing Sociology
• Research Methods
• Family
• Education
• Crime and Deviance
• Social Inequality
• Power and Politics

Unlike a lot of the previous GCSE resources I’ve posted [link] this is primarily a revision schedule rather than a simple list of revision notes (although these are also included). In this respect the Guide covers:

• How to revise
• Revision schedule
• Personal Learning Checklist [link]
• Basic study notes to supplement other reading (the Guide refers to “Collins Revision GCSE Sociology” but if you don’t use this text substituting your usual textbook will be fine)
• Keywords
• How to answer questions
• Past question practice

2. Sociology Revision Guide: Although not as ambitious or comprehensive as the above – the focus is on key terms and Notes covering Methods, Family and Education, plus a short section in exam advice – this Guide by Debbie McGowan is nicely designed and makes a welcome addition to your revision armoury. Presupposing you have one. If not, you can start one with this.

3. Revision Guide for Students: A nicely-designed and cleanly laid-out hyperlinked pdf by Jonathan Tridgell that covers:

• Research Methods
• Socialisation, Culture and Identity
• Family
• Education
• Mass Media

While the focus is on brief revision notes the Guide also includes information on:

• Course structure
• Exam technique
• Revision Tips.

And Guidettes…

These are less-ambitious and comprehensive in scope – the focus is on a single area of the course – but if you just need materials for that area these could fit the bill:

The following two guides are neatly designed and feature short Notes and important KeyWords.

• social issues: covers poverty and the fear of crime
• studying society: research methods by any other name.

Revision Activity Booklet: Crime: This follows the same general format as James Pearson’s Education Booklet – a useful combination of short Notes, Activities, exam advice and practice.

Crime and Deviance by Nanouska Tighe offers much the same as the above – short Notes and KeyWords combined with a bit of exam advice and practice. If you were paying for any of this it would be a difficult choice, but since you’re not it probably isn’t – you can just take both.

Research Methods Knowledge Organiser: The basic idea of a Knowledge Organiser is to condense essential information about a topic – in this instance Research Methods by Issy Hoole – onto a single A4 sheet. You can use this as both a starting point for methods revision and as a guide to the creation of further revision organisers.

Crime PowerPoint: More one for teachers, this is a set of PowerPoint revision slides by Chris Deakin that set-out the kind of knowledge that can be used as an introduction to a whole class revision session.