Many students right now will be in revision mode for Semester or half-yearly exams, or soon to be.
And most of these students will be revising in some of the least effective, in fact often totally useless ways.
Here’s the bottom line:
Revision has to be ACTIVE rather than PASSIVE.
And that means that they have to be doing something with the information they’re revising – processing it in some way. Here’s why, as well as some practical suggestions on how 🙂
Many students right now will be in revision mode for semester of half-yearly exams,
(or at least they should be), so I thought this would be a good time to share one of
THE . biggest . mistakes
I see students making in their revision.
(I know my personal coaching students will be so bored of hearing me say this, but I realised I actually haven’t hammered on about this publicly that much, so it’s time I did!)
Here’s the bottom line:
Revision has to be ACTIVE rather than PASSIVE.
I have a whole Catapult module dedicated to the specific strategies and techniques to make revision ACTIVE in my 10 Week Grade Transformation Program, but just getting to grips with this concept will be a huge step in the right direction for many students and parents for now.
By active I mean that they have to be DOING something with the information, processing it in some way.
So, no, reading or highlighting notes is NOT active 😉
Processing means transferring the info from one format to another and here’s why it’s so important:
Digesting the information and then making a decision about how to recreate it in a different format means that our brains have to have understood that information, not only proving to themselves that they ‘get’ the content, but also – this is much more likely to make it stick.
At the most basic level – this could be condensing full notes or text book info into colour-coded revision notes.
To do this effectively, students have to process and make decisions about which words and info are most important and decide which colour to use depending on the type of info it is.
For example is it a key word, a case study example, or is it a definition or is it a process?
But even better are techniques like converting text and notes into a mindmap, categorizing examples into a table, or turning a flowchart process into notes.
And I would advise, when time is getting tight, as it often does during revision
(unless of course, they use my reverse-engineered revision planning system!, also in the 10 Week program 🙂 )
that students are better off revising less information actively, than more information passively.
Because what’s the point of reading through 3 whole text book chapters if none or very little of it sticks or can be retrieved in the exam?
It’s waaaayyyyy more beneficial to get through just the key points of the 3 chapters, but know those really well and have them easily flow from brain to paper in the exam hall.
