This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Media Studies 8572. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Built without a single Close Study Product
Media Studies has a structural problem for anyone writing revision material. The specification is organised around Close Study Products: particular magazines, films, advertisements, television episodes, music videos and websites that AQA prescribes and then changes.
Resources built on them have a short shelf life, and a department using a different option set cannot use them at all.
These eleven activities contain no CSP. The specification map records that as an explicit decision rather than an oversight, and there is a topic area in our own curriculum tree named for it: CSP-independent generic knowledge.
The effect is a set that is permanently incomplete and permanently current. It cannot tell your students anything about the products they are studying. It can carry everything those products are being used to illustrate, which is what the framework questions actually test.
The framework, theorist by theorist
AQA's theoretical framework is where marks are won and lost, because it is the part students find abstract and the part that appears in every question regardless of product.
Four activities cover it in order. Semiotics and narrative theory, for the signs and the story structures. Genre theory and hybridity, which is the one students most often reduce to listing conventions. Representation theory fundamentals, on re-presentation, stereotypes and misrepresentation as distinct ideas rather than synonyms. Uses and gratifications, for the audience half.
Two more take the framework into specifics: codes and conventions by media category, and gender and social variable representation.
A student who can do these can walk into a question about any product. A student who has only learned the products has nothing to say when the question is about the framework.
Industries, which nobody enjoys and everybody is examined on
Two activities cover the business end: ownership, convergence and conglomeration, and funding models with regulation.
This is reliably the least popular part of the course with students and one of the most reliably examined. It is also the part where a wrong answer is obviously wrong, because the concepts are precise: a conglomerate is not the same thing as a convergence, and public service broadcasting is not the same thing as regulation.
Both are worth setting before a mock, precisely because a class will not revise them voluntarily.
Two activities on the exam itself
CSP-independent exam technique is a bank of the question types that can be answered from generic knowledge, with what each one is asking for. It is the most directly useful thing on this page for a class close to the exam.
Television screened extract technique covers the paper's distinctive feature: a moving-image extract shown in the room, watched under conditions, written about immediately. Students who have never practised the watching part write about plot.
If your students also take Sociology, AQA GCSE Sociology covers representation and power from a different theoretical direction, and the overlap is genuinely useful rather than repetitive.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
What this page does not do
No Close Study Products, by design. Your department's product knowledge has to come from your department.
Nothing for the non-exam assessment, the production brief and the statement of intent.
Nothing on this year's media landscape. Media Studies runs on current examples and these activities carry concepts instead.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.