Science

Highly effective:

Less effective (use along with the more effective techniques)

1.       Spaced practice – this is where revision is spread over a longer period, so revision starts as early as possible. This is because revision becomes more effective when it is built on prior knowledge and understanding of a topic becomes deeper with repetition.

Highlighting and underlining: are you highlighting everything or key ideas? Are you highlighting the right things? Does that mean what isn’t highlighted is unimportant? How will you ensure this is memorised? 

2.      Interleaving – revision should be done in small chunks, switching between topics and subjects each time. It has been shown to be better to leave a subject, study something else and revisit it again at a later date, than repeating revision straight away.

Summarising: useful if you are competent at picking out key points from text.

3.       Retrieval practice: Practicing questions and self-testing is crucial, not only to see how you are doing, but to develop understanding (as long as there is access to the answers, and you can review where they have gone wrong). This can even be as simple as the revision technique look-cover-recall-check-improve.

Re-reading notes: are you just reading or are you actively testing yourself on your understanding to improve later recall?

4.       Elaboration: Why questions: are you asking yourselves questions as to how things work and why they work as you cover content. Making links between other topics, examples and your own experiences.

Re-writing notes: similar to re-reading and highlighting? What are you doing with the information to ensure it stays with you? Do you understand what you are writing?

5.       Concrete examples – Refer to as many examples of a topic you are studying as possible. Vary the type of material you are using (text, video, modelled answers, audio) as well as different applications or contexts of the topic you are studying.

Going over the same notes again and again: try finding alternative viewpoints and examples to develop a deeper understanding of that topic.

6.       Dual Coding: When you use visuals as well as words/audio. This doubles your working memory capacity (your mental ‘desk-space’) rather than just words.

Things that you may think help you to concentrate, like music and TV to drown out background noise, use up working memory so you are able to process less. Classical music has been shown to help, however!