Our current year 10 students need to hit the ground running in September to be fully prepared for their GCSE exams next summer. And this means planning a personalised programme of revision – which requires organisation and thought.
While every revision programme should be bespoke, in this article we explore three core principles that underpin effective revision and which help students to keep on top of the content they have already studied in year 10 – as well as reinforce the new content they will be learning in year 11. We will also talk about how we can support our students’ revision planning when September comes.
Revision principle 1: Start early in year 11
The first such principle is implicit in the title: revision should start early and be distributed over several months – from September to May – to avoid last-minute cramming…
While many students might prefer to cram because learning feels slower and harder when it is “distributed” rather than “massed”, the sense of success that students feel while cramming is usually short-lived.
Cramming also leads to superficial learning whereas distributed practice bolsters the storage and retrieval strength of students’ knowledge and skills, ensuring learning is both deep-rooted and long-term. This, in turn, helps bolster their confidence as they approach their exams.
Pearson Revise Online is a new service from exam experts Pearson which offers access to revision resources for GCSE, with complete course coverage for Pearson Edexcel and AQA subjects, and it can help students distribute their revision because the platform includes ebooks, quizzes and knowledge checks, videos, and tailored suggested revision priorities for students.
It can also be used by teachers to plan GCSE revision sessions or in-class retrieval activities, as well as by students to help structure their revision.
Revision principle 2: Spacing and interleaving
The second principle is that revision should be spaced and interleaved.
Back in 1885, Ebbinghaus taught us that information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. In fact, his “Forgetting Curve” shows that we tend to halve our memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless we consciously review the learned material. But the Forgetting Curve also shows that these “reviews” should be carried out with increasing rarity. This calls for spaced practice…
Spaced practice involves leaving increasingly long gaps before returning to material. By waiting until they get to the point of almost forgetting something, students make the process of recall hard and, as such, they force themselves to think.
Spaced practice, therefore, is about emulating the conditions in which material was learnt initially – ensuring students think hard but efficiently about something that is beyond their current capabilities but within their reach.
Related to this, the stronger the memory, the longer we are able to recall it. Thus, students should not just space practice to improve their ability to retrieve prior knowledge (what’s called “retrieval strength”), but they should also interleave practice to build what’s called “storage strength”.
Interleaved practice is about mixing up study topics, revising prior learning in new ways so that students make new connections and thus strengthen the storage of information in their long-term memory. Interleaving also enables students to see connections that exist between different study topics and to place prior learning within the context of new learning. This improves transferability.
Again, Pearson Revise Online can help here because the platform provides knowledge checks and quick quizzes to direct students’ learning and identify gaps in their knowledge, so they can space and interleave their revision more effectively.
Revision principle 3: No to rote learning
The third principle is that revision should avoid learning by rote. Students should steer clear of reading and rereading study notes and should, instead, make use of self-quizzing to check their knowledge and understanding.
Along the way, students should be encouraged to find additional layers of meaning in new materials, relate new material to what they already know, explain new material to themselves and/or others, and explain how new material relates to the wider world and to their own experiences. This is called “elaboration”.
Students should also be encouraged to reflect on what they have learnt and then adjust their judgement to reflect the reality – in other words, they should actively answer every question and re-cap on every idea even if they think they know the answers. This is crucial because, sometimes, students can assume they know something when they don’t, or when they have actually forgotten it.
It also builds confidence by helping students consolidate what they do know. By answering every question – typing out or writing down the answers or even saying them out loud – students will remove this dangerous illusion of knowing. This is called “calibration”.
For revision to be most effective, students should be encouraged to leave spaces in their study notes where they can test themselves later. When they test themselves, they should be encouraged to write their answers down, not simply say them aloud or in their heads. The act of writing boosts long-term retrieval and uncovers false assumptions about what they know and don’t know.
Students should also attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution. The act of filling in a missing word – what’s called a “cloze test” – results in a stronger memory of the text than simply reading it. Before reading material, students should try to explain the key ideas they expect to find and how they expect these ideas will relate to their prior knowledge. This is called “generation”.
Finding the gaps: The quizzes, knowledge checks, and tailored suggested revision priorities on Pearson Revise Online allow students to identify where they need to focus their GCSE revision (image: Adobe Stock)
Also, students should be encouraged to use revision/flash cards, with a question or key term written on one side and the correct answer on the other. Students should then test themselves on all the questions and if they don’t answer a question right the first time, they should continue testing themselves until they get it right. They might manage this by removing revision cards once they’ve given the right answer but replacing cards in the pack if they get the answer wrong.
When using revision cards, if students persist until they answer each question correctly, they will enhance their chances of remembering the concepts during the final exam, but they shouldn’t stop there. Students should also be encouraged to “get it right” on more than one occasion. For example, they could return to the full deck of revision cards on another day (once they have already mastered them all) and re-test themselves.
The knowledge checks and quick quizzes available on Pearson Revise Online, by identifying gaps in knowledge, can help students know where to focus their revision and thus avoid rote learning.
Helping students to plan
So now we have our three core principles to underpin revision, what can we as teachers do to help our students plan their revision?
Mapping out home study: We can help students to map-out how many study sessions they will need at home, when those sessions should take place (which evenings of the week and between what times), and what they should practise during each session. Two short study blocks per week should be sufficient to begin studying new material as well as to restudy previously learned material. Students should be able to retrieve previous material more easily after just a few study sessions which leaves more time for studying new material.
Classroom approaches: We can use distributed practice in the classroom by repeatedly going back over the most important knowledge and concepts. For example, we could use weekly quizzes that repeat content several times so that pupils relearn some concepts in a distributed manner. Repeating key points in several quizzes not only highlights the importance of that content but also affords students the opportunity to engage in distributed practice.
Testing: We can set a cumulative – or synoptic – test that forces students to review the most important information they have studied this year.
Revision materials: We can use the same or similar revision materials and tools in class as students use at home. This strengthens the link between school and home, and helps students become familiar with revision resources and approaches.
As we have seen throughout this article, Pearson Revise Online offers access to revision resources for GCSE, with complete course coverage for Pearson Edexcel and AQA subjects.
The service is designed to be accessible for all students and costs £2.50 a month with no minimum term – so students can use it whenever they like, for as long as they need. They will automatically get a free seven-day trial when they sign up. School subscriptions are also available for just £399 per school, giving access to more than 50 guides for every GCSE student.
Revising is personal, and students may like to use books, or revise on-screen, or do a little of both. Pearson Revise offers easy-to-use, high-quality, affordable revision resources, online and in print, to help students unlock their learning potential – whatever their preferred approach.
Online: Pearson’s revision platform enables students to revise anytime, anywhere with all their GCSE revision guides in one place online. The platform also gives access to 50-plus ebooks for all core subjects.
In print: Pearson offers a range of revision guides, workbooks, revision cards, and practice papers available from Amazon and Pearson’s website. Their long history of working with schools, teachers and examiners has helped Pearson craft the revision series to best help students on their journey to success. Most of Pearson’s printed Pearson Revise resources are less than £5.
Finally, every teacher can sign up to get free access to Pearson Revise Online. There’s no catch – just free support for those face-to-face revision lessons at exam time, or for in-class retrieval activities throughout the year. All you need to do is fill in a short form on Pearson’s website, and they’ll do the rest.
Further information: To discover Pearson Review Online and sign up for free teacher access, visit
https://go.pearson.com/PearsonReviseOnline
Knowledge Bank: This article has been published by SecEd with sponsorship from Pearson Revise. It has been written and produced to a brief agreed in advance with Pearson.