Revision power hour
Revising can be difficult. With school, work, friends and other commitments on your mind. However, revising an hour at least per day is manageable and can be successfully accomplished if done the right way. Here are our tips for revising in an hour, effectively.
Where students go wrong when revising:
- A lot of students spend time revising content after content, but not enough time practising their exam technique
- Revising in one sitting and lose focus
- Passive revision such as reading from a textbook rather than active revision techniques
Here is how to successfully spend an hour revising:
Look at past papers:
You only have an hour so you need to be specific. Pick your subject, grab a past paper, get familiar with the mark scheme and choose a question. If you google your exam board you can find previous past papers and it’s highly likely the same or similar questions will come up again. Be knowledgeable when choosing your questions/topic. For example, if it’s English you are revising for, there may only be one 30-mark question. But a maths past paper is split into 10 marks, 6 marks, 2 marks and so on so it’s important to tackle the challenging questions. Don’t stay in your comfort zone, there is no room for growth here.
Top tip! Print off all the past papers you can find, once you are comfortable you can answer all the questions. Time yourself and remove distractions so you are working on your exam technique.
Revise:
Think about what you need to know in order to answer the question and revise those areas for 20 minutes. Look at the textbook and your own notes to give yourself the best chance at nailing the question. Make short bullet point notes, if you shorten information and put it into your own words then you will have more chance of learning this. Think of this stage as your preparation or refreshing your memory. You will have a chance to prepare in the exam.
Do the question:
Now that you have revised, set another timer for 20 minutes and get to work. This is to test your recall of what you’ve just learnt, but also to practise exam skills. Therefore, you would have covered both content and skills in an hour!
Mark your answer:
Where you got the past paper from will have the mark scheme in the same place. This is a crucial step, that many do skip. If you REALLY want to excel your exams you need to be able to think like an examiner. Marking your own work is therefore essential, or even give it to your teacher to mark or look over it. Many students have been answering questions but they haven’t been marking their own work. This is a crucial step, to critically evaluate answers. Without doing so they won’t gain the full benefit of doing the past paper.
Feedback:
Look at your friends answers and get the teacher to mark your work to see if you have given yourself the accurate self-marks. Over time you will see how you have improved and got more confident with answers.
Why the revision ‘power hour’ is effective:
- Going over content in different ways
- The way to improve immediately is to understand how to improve. Students gain this through their own marking and the marking teachers give
- It’s not enough to know your stuff- but also how you communicate it correctly.