Lively Words

Tag: how-to

  • GCSE revision: the ultimate method

    It is hard to know how to revise for exams. Even for seasoned uni students who have been taking exams for years, it can be hard to know where to begin. It stands to reason that the first time you do this, probably for your GCSE exams, it will be all the harder. As such, I hope that this guide will help you find a study method that works for you.

    For time-management tips, see my previous post!

    The method

    I divide learning up into 4 parts:

    1. Understand
    2. Apply
    3. Memorise
    4. Practice

    By going through each of these stages, you will gain confidence in your subjects, getting you closer and closer to the grades you want.

    But first, how do you know what to study?

    Very simply, you should study the things you find most difficult. This is how you will gain the most marks through your hard work.

    For each subject, start by going through the lists of topics and identifying the 3 topics you find hardest. Create a list of these that you can easily access and keep track of.

    For me this list could have looked like this:

    Chemistry: balancing symbol equations, moles, electrolysis

    French: irregular present tense verbs, prepositions, the conditional

    Now we get to work.

    Select 1 of the topics from above and decide how long you are going to revise for. If you have low energy, I’d recommend choosing a short amount of time – perhaps 20 minutes to start with. If you have more energy, you might choose 45 minutes. If, at the end of this period, you still have energy or motivation to continue, you can always add another 20 minutes and see how you go.

    1. Understand

    The first step in our revision process is making sure that you understand the basics of the topic. To test this, you should take out your notes or your textbook, and try to explain the content to someone who doesn’t know it. For example, a sibling, parent, pet or childhood toy. If you find that you cannot explain the content to someone else, you probably don’t understand it too well.

    If you do manage to explain it to someone else, scan throught he textbook page to ensure you explained correctly and got the important details. If so, move on to the next step.

    If you cannot explain the topic to someone else or if you feel confused/ overwhelmed about the topic, we will start our revision by improving our understanding of the topic.

    Method:

    Here we are trying to understand the topic, not memorise it or do questions. As such, focus on making it make sense to you above anything else at this stage.

    There are many ways you can improve your understanding by using textbooks, online resources, and by asking for support from teachers and tutors. What is crucial is for you to create notes on the topic that make sense to your brain. As such, you shouldn’t spend hours making them pretty, but you should use the design and colours if you want to aid your understanding.

    For instance, I created a poster explaining the water cycle in Biology. I didn’t understand the textbook explanation but BBC bitesize and youtube science teachers explained it much better. Making these notes took about 20 minutes. I drew the cycle out rather than writing it using words, then labelled my diagram. This process helped me to understand what I was doing and by the end I could explain the topic to someone else confidently.

    Hint: DO NOT simply read through the textbook in your head and assume you understand it. If you can’t explain it out-loud, or write a quick explanation out, it’s likely that you don’t actually understand. Likewise, watching revision content without taking notes to help you understand will likely result in you forgetting the material as soon as you turn the video off. Speaking and writing help you to remember the information you’re learning!

    Hint: For subjects such as maths, you may choose to include some example questions that a revision guide takes you through in your notes. Make sure you understand how the person who did the example questions got to the answer.

    2. Apply

    Now that you understand the topic, we need to apply it to exam-style questions.

    Find an exam question on the topic. I used to use past papers, revision workbooks (especially by CGP or Pearson), and BBC bitesize.

    With your notes beside you, answer the question as best you can. If it is a long question (e.g. a 6-marker) you may only do one question. If it’s a short question, (e.g. 1-2 marks) you should do several. We haven’t memorised the content yet, so you don’t need to do questions from memory.

    When you’re done with the questions, find the mark scheme.

    Mark your answers harshly, being sure that you’ve used all required keywords and methods. Use another colour pen to write in corrections.

    If you got the question mainly correct, congratulations!

    If you got the question partly right but left out some information or got something wrong, re-write the answer correctly.

    You should also rewrite your answer correctly if you got it completely wrong.

    Hint: Create a document or choose a notebook. In this document or notebook you should write the correct answers to exam-style questions you get wrong over the course of your revision. Have a section for each subject. This document will be great on the morning of your exam, when you’ll be able to look at the correct answers for many questions you’ve found difficult in the past.

    If you got 80% of the marks available, congratulations, you’re ready for the next stage.

    If you got 60-80%, have another go at some more questions.

    If you got less than 60% marks, go back to the understand stage and make sure you understand all the details well. Feel free to ask your teacher for help if you need it.

    3. Memorise

    Now that we understand the content and can use it in exam situations, we need to memorise it!

    There are many ways of memorising it, but they all centre on the fact that your brain needs to be pushed and tested in order to remember things. After all, how does your brain know that something’s important if it is never asked to recall it?

    Methods that you can try:

    • Quizlet flashcards
    • Anki flashcards
    • the Blurt method
    • paper flashcards
    • having a family member/ friend test you
    • many other methods

    Hint: Be sceptical if you choose to have AI help you with this. AI can ‘hallucinate’ information. This means that AI can competely make up ideas and present them as true. As such, AI cannot be trusted to tell you if a fact is true or false, or if it’s on the exam syllabus. By using AI for revision, you therefore risk learning false information.

    I personally have flashcards for all the important facts in each module. For example, equations I may need in Physics, symbol equations in chemistry, key dates in History. I do 5 minutes of these flashcards at the beginning of every revision session for that subject, before beginning my work on the module I’m working on that day.

    4. Practice

    Congratulations, you’ve nearly mastered your topic! The last step is to practice using the information you’ve learnt. This process is ongoing as you do past papers over the course of revision season.

    • You can do more practice questions with your notes and without a timer.
    • You can do more practice questions with your notes and with a timer.
    • You can do practice questions without your notes and without a timer.
    • You can do practice questions without your notes and with a timer.

    You should also keep going with the ‘memorise’ step for all your topics to make sure your brain remembers the key information.

    This should be all the information you need in order to plan your revision for ost subjects. Many apps and videos and textbooks are there to support you. However, it is how you use them that matters. I’m going to finish up with a list of revision techniques that are not time or energy efficient, and that are unlikely to get you the result you want:

    • Reading the textbook like a novel
    • Watching revision videos passively
    • Only working on topics you’re already confident in.
    • assuming that you know information without testing whether you do.

    Lastly, for skill-based subjects like languages it may be helpful to have a more subject-specific guide. I will write this in the future.

    Good luck!

  • GCSE tips: How to plan your revision without strict study timetables.

    With GCSEs coming up fast, many of my students have been asking how to revise for different subjects. As such, I’m going to take a break from my usual topics to tell you how I revised for my GCSE exams in order to get the grades to go to Oxbridge.

    Despite preferring literature and languages, I got all 9s in my GCSE Science exams. How? Simply through hard work. Although the same methods don’t work for everyone, I hope that by sharing how I planned and executed my revision I might be able to help some of you feel more confident in the run up to May and June!

    Set yourself up for success

    However tempting it may be, it is crucial to avoid spending hours and hours writing out a beautiful, colour-coded and overly optimistic revision timetable. The vast majority of students will never be able to stick to such schedules, and seeing yourself fail to live up to impossible standards every day will only hinder your revision. So the question is, how should you plan?

    As far as I’m concerned, the first step is to know yourself: when and where do you study best? Are you a morningg person or an evening person? Bedroom, desk, floor, library or café? If you have the choice, I wouldn’t advise studying in bed, as this can impact your sleep if you start associating your bed with work. The time of day can also have an impact – I know that there is very little chance of me studying well between 11am and 2pm, or after 7pm, so this time is almost always free time for me. Over the next month or so you can experiment with different times of day and study locations to find what works best for you.

    As you get to know yourself a bit better, you can think about what your attention span looks like at the moment. Think about the things that help you stay focused, and the things that hinder you in your efforts. Does exercise help you, for instance? What about a hearty breakfast?

    A big question is how using social media impacts you? As much as I enjoy watching fun little videos of anteaters eating fruit platters, I’m also very aware that short-form videos utterly destroy my ability to concentrate. If you think this might be true for you too, consider deleting the apps where you watch these videos, just until exams are done. See if, within 3 weeks of deleting them, your focus improves. And this goes for anything else that stops you concentrating during the day, too: from chatrooms that pull your focus to habits that take up a lot of mental energy without giving much back, lots of things can drain the energy we’d like to use for study. You should really consider what’s important to you in the few months before your exams. After all, you only have a certain amount of energy each day, and you want a healthy balance between exam prep and hobbies that actually help you rest and reset.

    Finally, be realistic with yourself about your lifestyle and the choices you’re currently making. There are some habits, not least choosing to study with all our closest friends, which are usually fine, but which don’t support our goals when it gets close to exams. If you have any habits that you think are detrimental to your health and wellbeing, or which impact the likelihood of doing work in the time you’ve set aside for study, consider if they’re actually supporting your goals or not.

    Now it’s time to plan.

    Now that you know yourself better, we can create a realistic study plan. Please note my key word – ‘realistic’ ! If you create an impossible plan, you will lose your motivation to work very quickly. It’s far better to create a realistic plan that you can surpass when you have the energy, than an impossible plan you’ll fail to live up to 80% of the time.

    There are lots of different methods of planning your time. I’ll take you through a method I’ve used instead of revision timetables, and you can decide if any of it might work for you.

    Flexible time blocking

      A problem I often have is that the subjects I’ve planned to study on a particular day don’t match up with the subjects I actually feel like working on. That’s where flexible time blocking comes in.

      Planning your time:

      This method comes down to knowing how much work you want to do each day, and keeping track of what you have done to make sure you actually meet your targets, even for subjects you’re less inclined to spend time on.

      Begin by writing a list of your subjects. Decide how many hours you’d like to spend on each every month, and calculate the total.

      For example, I might choose to study each of my 8 subjects for 6 hours this month.

      8 subjects x 6 hours = 48 hours of study this month.

      Now work out how many days you’d like to study this month.

      Note: DO NOT say ‘every day’ – there may be days when you are unwell, have other priorities or need a rest. Schedule in rest to give yourself flexibility and to ensure you meet your goals.

      Divide the total number of hours you’d like to study by the number of study days this month to find out what you need to do each day:

      If I studied 25 days that month, 2 hours each day would mean I surpassed my target of 48 total hours of study.

      If I studied 20 days that month, 2.5 hours each study day would be enough.

      Know exactly what you want to make progress on this month.

      If you know you want to study each subject for 6 hours this month, then you can pre-select 6 topics per subject that you want to work on.

      Start by reading through your subject specification (or even just the contents of your exam-board certified textbook!) and making a list of the 6 topics you know you find difficult.

      You can decide how many topics you want to cover based on the number of hours you want to commit this month.

      E.g. For my goal of 6 hours per subject this month:

      French:

      • prepositions
      • the present tense of regular verbs
      • the perfect tense
      • adjectives
      • the near future tense
      • the conditional mood

      Biology

      • osmosis
      • plant cells
      • the water cycle
      • the eye
      • hormones
      • bacteria

      English

      • Juliet quotes
      • Mr Utterson analysis
      • theme of the gothic
      • An Inspector Calls context
      • Shakespeare context
      • unseen poetry practice

      I will write another article telling you how to study these – for now I’ll focus on planning. However, knowing what you want to improve on this month will give each study session meaning, and help you see that you are in fact making progress. It also means that more of the study time is spent studying and less is spent procrastinating by deciding what work to do!

      Implementing the plan

      The key to this technique is that I’m not going to plan each study session weeks in advance. Rather, I’m going to let what I feel able to happy to revise that day guide my choices.

      Now that I’ve decided on time goals for the month, and on a list of topic priorities, I’m going to allow myself to plan each day individually. This means that, instead of saying ‘next Thursday I will study biology, English and maths, and on Friday I will do PE, RS and Chemistry’, I will simply focus on the short term in the knowledge that my tracking system will ensure that all content is covered.

      Personally, I like to plan my days in the morning. Some people do it the night before, though, and you should do it the way that works best for you.

      When planning my day I look at my commitments for the day and decide if it is a study day or a rest day. If it is a study day, I will also plan when and where I will choose to study. Next, I will look at my list of topics and decide on those that I will be tackling today depending on how I’m feeling.

      When I get to work, I will add a tally to my list of subjects each time I have studied a subject of half an hour. This allows me to keep track of the subjects I jave and haven’t put time into this month, and whether I’m meeting my goals or not.

      If I notice that I’m not putting enough time into a particular subject, I will try my best to commit more time to it. The ‘eat the frog’ method, by which you do your hardest subject first, can help! Personally, I like to remember that I can do a particular subject for just half an hour if I find the idea of a whole hour overwhelming, so you could even try doing half an hour of your hardest and then half an hour of your most confident subject to help yourself stay motivated.

      How should I study?

      I will write another article explaining how to go about studying different subjects. However, this post should have shown you how to plan your time in a flexible way if you don’t like revision timetables, and how to work out the topics you’re going to study.

      It’s important to know that no plan is bullet-proof. Life happens, after all. However realistic a plan is, things might happen that mean that you don’t meet your goals every day – illness, friendship troubles, unexpected family commitments, good or bad news… the list goes on. As such, I don’t believe in ‘making up time’ – if you miss a day of study, simply pick yourself off, dust off the disappointment and get going with your next study day when you are able.

      Good grades aren’t about perfection, nor about studying every day. Good grades are about having a plan and realistic goals that you work towards whenever you are able, and making progress little by little. If you work with your brain and study in a way that works for you, in quantities that work for you, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make the progress you want to make.

      Good luck!