The First Big Secret – You Don’t Need to Revise Everything….
Surely one of the most off-putting aspects of revision is the sheer amount of content to be covered. With many pupils taking up to 10 subjects at GCSE, the volume of material leaves many learners feeling overwhelmed and disheartened before they even start. However, what if we could teach the art of knowing what not to revise because it already known? Well, that is exactly what we specialise in here at Radical Revision. One of my favourite sessions in the programme demonstrates how to quickly identify and ‘bank’ existing knowledge thus freeing up learners to focus their short revision ‘bursts’ on retrieving and strengthening the information that they are less sure of.
Why not try …
The 5 Minute Revision Challenge
Put 60 seconds on the clock. Without looking at any notes, ask your teen to focus on one specific topic and write down as much as they can remember in just one minute. Get them to count how many things they managed to come up with and to record this score.
Next, reset the timer for 3 mins. Learners should spend that time scanning through their notes for things they had not previously recalled. These should not be written down at this stage.
Finally, close the notes and put a further 1 minute on the timer. During this time ask your teen to return to their first list and add to it based on what they can recall from their 3-minute scan of their notes.
The good news is that anything that they wrote down in the first 60 seconds is ‘banked’ – they already have this locked in and don’t need to spend time revising it.
They should repeat this challenge several times for the same topic trying to increase their score. As every topic needs revising more than once, each time they repeat the 5 minute challenge they should have more ‘banked’ information, leaving them with less and less to actually revise.
This is just one of the methods that we teach students during our Radical Revision tutorials that enable them to identify what things they DO NOT need to revise!