The best way to revise is to interact with the content or skill you are trying to learn with as many senses as possible and to repeatedly retrieve that information over a period of time. These two methods are called active learning and retrieval practice.
I came up with the revision cycle about 10 years ago, when I was reflecting on how best to help my students with their revision. I recalled some of the steps I took and pooled together the most useful steps to give students direction on how best to revise without the time wasting of trial and error.
RAG rate your PLC
The first step in my revision cycle is more motivational. To get the students to do a past paper exam question on a topic that they should be fairly good at. This is to give them that psychological confidence boost. There are some revision topics I struggled with, when I was studying for my A levels, degree and post graduate exams. This is even more of a struggle with a young adolescent mind. Especially when you are doing compulsory exams in a core subject they had no option of dropping.
In order to really know what you are good at and what you are not, you will need to assess your knowledge of the unit or topic. You can do this with a personal learning checklist (PLC). PLCs are usually sold with courses that your school or college buy and a good teacher will share them with their students. They allow you to RAG rate each topic. You indicate, either with colour or by writing the letters, R, A or G to show whether you don’t know the topic at all, know the topic somewhat or are really confident in your understanding of that topic respectively. See the example below.
Past paper question check
So pick at least one topic that you think you know about. If you are getting 80% or more of the marks correct, pat yourself on the back and pick a topic that you are not so good at. Pick one that you have indicated as amber or red on your PLC.
Complete some past paper exam questions on that topic, under exam conditions. You will still be revising whilst doing this. Many teachers will agree completing past paper exam questions in itself is a good way to revise. Get a stopwatch and work in a distraction free environment without access to the answers.
Make an interactive revision tool
Now you have to make an interactive revision tool. This will help you to interact with the content or skill that you need to commit to your long term memory. Don’t just copy notes from your revision guide onto lined paper, without ever looking at it again. Make flashcards, use sticky notes to make reusable flow charts, or reusable mind maps. These methods are all good methods to revise. Make Cornell notes to help you as well. You can make these and use the key notes to make them more interactive. However, in a simple way you can just use a piece of card or piece of paper to cover up the main body of the notes. To find out more about how to make Cornell notes there is a video in my metacognition- thinking about thinking video series that can be found here.
Practice your knowledge/skill retrieval
You have to reuse your interactive revision tool at least three times in order to get the best out of it and have the most impact. I suggest using it 6 times because over the course of a 2-year GCSE course, you will hopefully use the interactive revision tool at least three times in the first year and another three times in the second year. Making a total of 6 times. Given the date that this article is published and the time before the exams start is not long, it may not be feasible to practice retrieval 6 times in that time period. However, you could at least practice retrieval three times between now and the exams and benefit from it. You should then retest yourself with the exam past paper questions. Hopefully, you should see an improvement from your last score.
Remember you could always use past paper questions as part of your revision. This is where a resource such as Seneca learning is really useful because it is a form of retrieval practice. It functions by asking the same questions for a particular topic, over and over again. Therefore is an example of retrieval practice. It is interactive, but not a revision tool that you make yourself but one that you use on a regular basis.
Interleaving
Interleaving means that you do the retrieval practice with a particular time interval between each session, so it’s no good doing the retrieval practice on one day and then the following day do the retrieval practice and the following day do the third retrieval practice. In this instance you are not actually giving your brain enough time in between to forge long term connections. Therefore, you will need to leave at least a week if possible between each occasion of retrieval practice for it to have the most significant impact and the longer you leave it (not too long mind) the better it is. To conclude the word revision means to review. Therefore interleaving retrieval practice is a really good way to revise. Happy revising!