The Physics Question Bank

Required practical questions are worth at least 15% of the marks in GCSE Physics, and they are the questions students most often answer from memory of a lesson they did a year ago. So I’ve made one slideshow that covers all ten, in the same order every time, that you can put on the board or give to students to revise from.

Four slides per practical

• Method – five to seven short numbered steps, with the aim, an equipment list and the key equation. Short enough to learn, which matters when a 6-mark question asks students to describe it.
• Sample results – a results table with three repeats and a mean, a graph, and a worked calculation.
• Working scientifically – the independent, dependent and control variables, the main hazard and how to reduce it, accuracy and precision, and an example of a random and a systematic error.
• Conclusion and improvements – what the results show, the science that explains it, an evaluation, and four improvements.

Every slide is labelled with the GCSE Physics practical number and the Combined Science number – so specific heat capacity is Physics RP1 and Combined Science RP14 – and the two practicals Combined Science students don’t do, thermal insulation and light, are marked Physics only.

The graphs are where the marks go

The sample results are not just tidy numbers. They are there to teach the four graph points that come up again and again:

• Through the origin means directly proportional. Resistance against length, force against extension and the I–V graph for a resistor all go through (0, 0) – and students should say why: zero length, zero resistance.
• Not every straight line goes through the origin. In the acceleration practical the line cuts the force axis at about 0.1 N. F = ma says it should pass through the origin; it doesn’t, because some of the force is used to overcome friction. That’s an exam answer in itself.
• Categoric data gets a bar chart. Type of insulating material and type of surface are categories, not numbers, so the insulation and infrared results are bar charts – and the slide says so.
• Anomalies are left out of the mean. Two practicals include an anomalous result, highlighted in the table, with the mean worked out without it.

Every graph shows the results as points with a line or curve of best fit, never dot-to-dot.

How to use it

You can flick through it on the page, but it works best downloaded. Run it as a slideshow and the menu, the coloured tabs and the “next practical” buttons all become clickable, so you can jump straight to the results slide of the density practical without scrolling through forty slides. There’s also a key words slide covering accurate, precise, resolution, repeatable, reproducible, anomalous, and random, systematic and zero errors.

One way I’d use it in a revision lesson: show the method slide, hide it, and ask students to write the method from memory in numbered steps. Then show the working scientifically slide and ask for the control variables before revealing them.

Each practical also has its own page on this site with a method, a video link and eight exam-style questions with answers – the slideshow links to all of them from the Required Practicals page.

The slideshow is free. If you’d like the same approach for calculations, the Every Equation PowerPoint covers every equation on the AQA equation sheet, with a free sample to try first.