Do you spend hours revising but struggle to retain the information? Feel like no matter how hard you work you can never do yourself justice in exams? What if it’s not you, but rather the way you’ve learned to revise that’s the issue?
Research suggests that many common and popular revision techniques, such as re-writing notes or memorising PowerPoints, are highly ineffective and inefficient. That’s because they are passive revision techniques, which lead to short-term, surface level learning.
Using more active techniques encourages deeper, longer-term learning and should (hopefully) lead to better marks.
Watch the recording of our Lightning Session on ‘Effective Revision’ then scroll down for some tips on how you can start to incorporate active techniques into your revision.
Tip 1: Don’t change everything overnight
While you want to maximise your revision and minimise ineffective techniques, it’s better not to change too much at one time. Think evolution rather than revolution.
Try out one or two of the suggested active techniques and incorporate them into your revision. Over time you can explore more of these techniques and build a toolkit of approaches that work for you.
Meanwhile, look out for passive techniques which take up a lot of your time for little or no reward, and start to replace them with the active techniques that work for you.
Tip 2: Two key concepts
Active learning is all about information retrieval or recall. Put simply, the more often you have to retrieve or recall information from your brain, the more strongly you’ll reinforce that learning.
Another key concept is spaced practice. Research suggests that spreading out your studying over a longer period of time is more effective and leads to better learning than if you spend the same amount of time crammed into a shorter period.
This means that the earlier you start revising the better, and that doing some work as the semester progresses will reduce the number of hours you need to put in come exam revision time.
But it can also help in the revision period itself. Imagine you allocate two hours to a particular topic. It will pay to spread that two hours out over several weeks, perhaps in half-hour slots, rather than spending two hours on the topic in one sitting then ticking it off as done. Hopefully, you can also see how this approach would also allow you to build in that element of information retrieval we mentioned above.
You can read more about these concepts in Revision Bites.
Tip 3: Find the active techniques that work for you
Popular active revision techniques include:
- Flashcards
- Past papers or sample papers
- Teaching or discussing a topic
- Study partners or groups
- Brain dump
- Creating mind maps
We discuss these – and many others – in more detail in the Lightning Session and on Revision Bites, so be sure to check both out if you haven’t already. But be aware that not every technique will work for you, and not every technique which works will do so in every situation.
Your goal is to arm yourself with a range of options which, over time, will allow you to approach revision and exams with real confidence.
This blog post was written by Dr Gordon Spark, Academic Skills Centre.