News Feature: Helpful Tips for Revision
By Ella and Emily
In the lead up to GCSE and A-Level exams, Mr. Rye and Mr Griffin have delivered assemblies to Year 11 and others about the importance of reinforcing prior knowledge coming into exam season. ‘Revision is a powerful technique that improves your self motivation, focus and allows you to truly understand concepts’ said Bolingbroke student Phoebe in Year 11 after listening to the expert advice offered.
We at The Bark have therefore compiled a list of methods that we have found useful. We hope you do too!
1. Pomodoro technique This entails taking 25 minutes of focused revision and rewarding yourself with a 5 minute of break. It promotes focus by repeating short spurts of concentrated revision. After 4 Pomodoro sessions, give yourself a longer break to limit boredom! These longer breaks actually allow more well-rounded movement of information from the short term to the long-term memory for increased recall.
2. Dual coding This is the use of words and pictures to reinforce learning. By associating knowledge to imagery, it allows you to remember and explain concepts a lot easier. For example: you might storyboard of the events of World War 2.
3. Copy Cover Write Check This method involves remembering individual topic facts and definitions (especially useful in Geography and Biology) by writing them down repeatedly. Acronyms also work for this method like PEEL paragraphs. This will increase your confidence in memorising things that are hard to remember on their own!
4. Cornell Notes are a wonderful way of summarising, consolidating and testing your learning all at the same time. The idea is to split your page into a ¾ section and ¼ section. Write down everything you remember from the topic in the larger area- either from memory or from a specification, whatever suits! Then, on the smaller section, make up your own exam questions and answer them to test your knowledge of the topic. PLEASE SEE IMAGE BELOW
5. Flash Cards Make cards and slot them in knowledge dividers, moving the card forward one place once you have recalled them when tested!
