Study Tips

Study Tips

Revision Timetable

The first place to start with an effective study strategy is to get organised in how and when you’re going to structure your revision. The best place to begin, depending on whether you prefer to use a website or app to do most of the work for you, or if you’d rather figure it out yourself, is to get an idea of the time available to you:
● Start with your whole day, take out any commitments – school, clubs, mealtimes, rest time, sleep time, and see what’s left!
● Map out a standard week like this (I know things are likely to change every so often), and figure out how many hours you have to revise, so then you can divide this between your different subjects.
● When figuring out how to split your time, also consider:

• Which subjects are going to need more or less of your time, based on which are your weaker or stronger areas,
• Which subjects have the most content to learn,
• Which subjects are going to need time for long practice papers to be factored in, and
• Where you can cut down time required by creating resources to have up around your room to passively learn as you go about your day.

Did you know: I have a revision planner available to help you organise your time on a day-to-day basis, where you can fi ll in your plan on an hourly scale, and also keep track of what work you have completed that day, and how to move yourself forward… oh and a little mental health check on the side.

Once you’ve sorted out when to revise, you then need to figure out how revision is going to work for you:

Use of colour

You have several options for how to use colour effectively while revising, through colour coordinated subjects or sub-topics, use of coloured papers, pens or highlighters, using colour sparingly for more effect, or if a simpler black and white colour scheme helps you focus.

If you are making posters;
● Use brightly coloured papers to catch your attention, and coordinate by subject to help organise your memory. In this case, I would recommend keeping the number of colours on the page to a minimum, as it can get quite chaotic and clashing against the colour of the page.
● Make sure your writing can still be easily seen by not using dark coloured paper. When it comes to use of pens;
● Use a maximum of 6 different colours on a page to avoid chaos! This includes your ‘base’ writing colour (your black or blue that most of your page is written in).
● Coordinate the use of different colours by using a certain colour for definitions, methods etc. and continue this colour scheme throughout your revision.
● Don’t spend ages making it pretty!
● Highlighters are, by definition, to highlight the most important information. Keep their use well coordinated (like other pens), and keep to the minimum number of colours per page so your eyes aren’t overwhelmed.

Flashcards/Posters
A revision strategy that can be used as a passive resource is a flashcard or poster – yes they take time to make (see writing notes section below), but once they’re done:
● Flashcards can be in your pocket or bag at any time, or you can keep them to hand to flick through whilst you’re waiting for a bus or train, sitting in the car, or have some spare time to check through some with friends at lunchtime.
● A poster with some key info on can be stuck up on your bedroom wall, next to your mirror, on the back of the bathroom door or anywhere you walk past or stop on a regular basis. This way, every time you pass it, you can glance over at it, which will gradually become a case of you remembering the info is there but not needing to look at it anymore!

Flashcards are usually used either for small amounts/summarised information, so that you can reread/test yourself in bursts, or they can be used with a question on one side and the answer on the other, again as another testing method, which can be done on your own or with a family member/friend.

Posters are more for key information that you just need to learn by heart – this could be angle rules/exact trig values in Maths, a timeline of events in History or some key quotes for English. Make them quite simple but hard to ignore so that you can’t help but look at them (I used bright coloured paper when making revision posters at school).

Testing
You’ll be told by anyone and everyone that doing past papers is the way forward, but how you approach them makes a massive difference to their impact.
● Working your way through a paper, doing all the questions you know is great for recall, but doesn’t necessarily teach you anything new.
● Trying the questions you’re unsure on is a better way to aid recall, as you’re having to dig deeper and rely on instinct (it may still be wrong, but you’re more likely to pick up some marks regardless, and it may well actually be right!) This method also gives you a clear understanding of how well you know a topic, and the precise parts of it you still need to revise.
● Using your notes (or someone else’s/a website) to remind you of a topic/method is the next option I would recommend, as you’re being given a nudge in the right direction, but still need to rely on your understanding of the topic to answer the question. If you are able to do this for a question, it already means that you have identified which topic you need for the question, which is step 1 out of the way!

Once you have finished your paper, you will need to mark it:

● Looking through the mark scheme, ticking off marks you’ve clearly got is great for an overall view of your ability… but not the best!

○ Writing down full corrections will help you to embed the information/exam techniques you haven’t secured so far.

● Looking at the way the marks are allocated helps you to understand what the examiner will be looking for – a certain word or phrase, a clear method or explanation, or maybe just a certain level of understanding from the question (i.e. have you pulled out the bit of information they were looking for?)
● For the marks you didn’t get, why was that? Did you not fully understand the question? Was it just a mistake at the time? Did you skip something you thought was obvious, and get penalised for it?

• Write down all the things you easily could have done to gain a few more marks (including the ‘silly mistakes’), and see how much that equates to over a whole paper – you’ll probably be surprised!
• Then make note of all the topics/questions you didn’t know how to do, and prioritise these for future revision.

The other thing to note is that a test can be used as a pretest (figuring out what it is you need to learn), or an assessment of what it is you have already learnt, but essentially it works as a cycle!

Write Notes
Another method as old as time – writing notes to help you remember something, or as something to refer back to. But of course, it’s not going to be just as easy as that, is it?
● Writing notes is time consuming (as I’m sure you’ll have realised), so use the time well. Read/listen to the information you need to learn, and summarise it as best as you can, so that by the time you have fi nished writing it, it is a lot smaller than when you started – there’s no point just rewriting a whole book into the same sized book (or as some people like to do, just missing out “and”, “the”, “but” etc. and thinking that counts as summarising).
● If you find summarising hard to do, start by highlighting the original text (use a pencil lightly if you’re not meant to be writing on it!), pulling out the key information, then transferring it over to your page/flashcard.
○ If this still isn’t working for you, find a willing parent or friend who will help you pick out the information.
● Most people learn best through use of several senses, so read the text out loud to yourself before/while writing, as this will combine auditory (listening), visual (seeing), and kinaesthetic (doing), so you’ll be learning three different ways at the same time.

Spider Diagrams/Mind Maps/Brain Dump
This type of method has had many names over the years, but essentially involves writing down everything you can think of onto a page in a less formal way than writing notes or flashcards, for example.
There are two main approaches to these methods:
● Free recall – This is literally a case of taking a piece of paper and pen, and just writing anything down you can think of about a subject as a whole.
● Specification brain dump – this is a little bit more specifi c, and more suited to the spider diagram/mind map style, whereby the title will go in the middle, and off of that will come branches on subtopics, and smaller branches with information about those topics.

In both examples, write down anything you can remember on the subject, then look back on your notes/books and work out what you’ve missed or misremembered, and write these things onto the page, perhaps in a different colour so that you’re reminded that these are things to work on for future.

Self/Peer Teach
All these teachers around, and I’m about to tell you to teach yourself! In the job I do, it doesn’t always go down well when I ask my students to work things out for themselves, but it’s actually one of the ways to understand things best. If you can figure something out entirely on your own, then the only way this happens is if the knowledge is already in your head somewhere. The other way to test this theory is to teach a friend – I’m sure everyone at some point has had someone say to them “I don’t get this. How do you answer this question?” or something similar. Being able to explain whatever it is, and answer the other person’s questions in a way that then enables them to understand what to do going forward, means that you have mastered the topic for yourself.

I have personal experience with this, as I had to resit a module of my A Level Maths in Year 13, and spent the hours beforehand teaching the Year 12 students for the same exam – I ended up coming out of the exam early, having been able to answer every question.

Spaced Repetition
However you choose to do this logistically – through flashcards, mind maps, questions – is your choice, but spaced repetition is really important when revising.
It is essentially what it sounds like – revise something, then come back to it the next day, then a couple of days after that, then a week later etc. increasing the increments of time gradually, but ensuring that you still remember the information.
If you find that there is something that you have not remembered, restart the time increments for that again, whereas something you easily recall can wait a bit longer. One example of how to do this is through use of flashcards – any you remember go on one pile, and those you don’t go onto another pile. Your next revision session for that subject is then a great time to revisit the “didn’t remember” pile, and see if any can be moved over. Eventually, this information will have entered your long term memory, and the time it takes you to recall all of the information will decrease, so your last minute cramming session (we all do it!) will be a quick run through of the whole subject with very little to recap – if you’ve done this well!