Description: 11+ and Maths Tutor Shana gives her insight and main tips on how to get top marks in exams.
The key to success in any exam is perfecting your revision technique to allow for optimum knowledge retention. There are various forms of revising. These include making notes, flashcards or mind maps. Whilst all of these can be useful, recent studies have shown active recall and spaced repetition are the most effective ways to learn. This blog covers what these two methods are and how to implement them.
Active Recall
Active recall is the action of stimulating your memory to get a piece of information you have learnt for your exam. Fundamentally, this means you should try to test yourself with practice questions throughout your revision process. Exams are essentially a large active recall exercise. Practising this technique will be very beneficial to prepare you for them.
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is revisiting the same topic over spaced intervals during your revision period. The aim of this is to turn short term memories into long term memories by reviewing the material. This could be after one day, three days, one week and a month. It means that as you start to forget the information, your brain has to work hard to retrieve it. This will ultimately cause a stronger memory of it to form. This active form of revising, instead of passively re-reading notes, causes much better results in exams. A great way to make sure you are applying spaced repetition well is to make a table with all the topics for a subject in the left-hand column, and putting in the dates you visit the topic alongside it. This allows you to keep track of what you should be revisiting and when.
How To Put These Into Practice Together
There are multiple ways you can implement these two methods together to maximise your revision. One method is going over a textbook and instead of writing notes from it. You will end up with a long list of questions per topic which you can then revisit at the spaced intervals listed above. When I was a student I found this particularly useful when I was revising for my A-level Biology exams as there was a lot of content to learn. I would go through my notes from lessons and make flashcards on Quizlet. I had a set of questions for each topic, and after practising them a few times I could answer them all quite well.
Read, Write, Memorise
Another way to put this into practice is by reading through a topic beforehand, and then writing notes on it from memory. You can then compare your notes to a textbook and fill in anything you have missed out. Moreover, it requires your brain to use its cognitive power, meaning you are forming long term memories, as well as showing you the topics you need to revisit. Redoing closed book notes for each topic at larger spaced intervals (for instance every month) enhances your learning even more.
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