Revision

How to revise #3: Elaboration

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elaboration

 

This is the third post in a series looking at the most effective ways to revise, based on the work of The Learning Scientists. The Learning Scientists are cognitive psychologists who want to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students and teachers. Their aim is to motivate students to study and increase the use of effective study and teaching strategies that are backed by research. I’ve met Yana Weinstein PhD at an education conference in Southampton last week – she’s the real deal!

Read all the revision posts here. 

Elaboration: what is it?

When you are elaborating, you are explaining and describing what you are revising with as many details as possible. You are looking for answers to why and how things work, and you are looking for connections between the material and other things you know.

Elaboration: why?

When you elaborate, you focus on the details and the connections between the material (what you are revising) and things in your own experience and knowledge (already safely in your long-term memory). These details and connections create “hooks” to help you remember the material you are revising.

Also, by working the material through your brain and doing something with it, you are strengthening the connections in your memory.

Elaboration: how do I do it?

How you elaborate depends on what it is that you are revising. Let’s say you are revising Biology, and you want to remember cell structures. You could ask yourself why animal and plant cells differ, and how they differ. Note the answers down, or say them out loud to yourself (or into a voice memo recorder). You could then ask yourself how they are similar, and why.

Always check that your elaborations are accurate after you’ve done them. Refer back to your notes, textbooks, or online resources. Correct and mistakes and repeat the elaboration with the corrections, otherwise you’ll risk remembering the incorrect material.

Elaboration: next steps

In the early stages of elaboration, it’s a good idea to have your notes around you to refer to. The eventual aim, however, is to get to the point where you can describe and explain accurately without the material in front of you.

Elaboration: watch the video

 

How to revise #2: Spaced Practice

/ chrishildrew / 2 Comments

 

 

This is the second post in a series looking at the most effective ways to revise, based on the work of The Learning Scientists. The Learning Scientists are cognitive psychologists who want to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students and teachers. Their aim is to motivate students to study and increase the use of effective study and teaching strategies that are backed by research. I’ve met Yana Weinstein PhD at an education conference in Southampton – she’s the real deal!

Read all the revision posts here.

Spaced Practice: what is it?

Spaced practice, sometimes called distributed practice, means that you revise little and often rather than all at once.

Spaced Practice: why?

forgetting curve

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – reviews over time lead to better retention of learned information

Spacing out your revision so that you revisit your material again and again  over time with breaks in between is far more effective than cramming all at once. Studies have shown that revisiting material helps secure the connections in your brain.

Spaced Practice: how do I do it?

Spaced practice needs planning – but it can start straight away. In any year, you can start spaced practice immediately to help secure your learning for the future. At the weekend, give yourself time to go over what you’ve learned in the previous week. It doesn’t need to be long – just a few minutes to make sure you’ve remembered what you’ve studied during the week.

Spaced Practice: next steps

After a few weeks, go back over the stuff from a month ago to make sure it’s still there. If you have to remind yourself of things that you’ve forgotten – don’t worry! Re-learning and reminding yourself of things you’ve forgotten actually makes the retention rate better.

In the run-up to exams, make sure you revise your material a little and often, leaving spaces of a few days between sessions on the same subject.

When you are revising, use the retrieval practice method, elaboration (see post #3!) and self-testing. Don’t just read over your notes – make your brain work hard with the material so you remember it better.

Finally, don’t leave all your revision to the night before – you won’t remember it! You’re actually far better off getting a good night’s sleep than pulling an all-nighter. Your brain will be sharper and more effective for the exam if you’re well rested.

Spaced Practice: watch the video

How to Revise #1: Retrieval Practice

/ chrishildrew / 5 Comments

This is the first post in a series looking at the most effective ways to revise, based on the work of The Learning Scientists. The Learning Scientists are cognitive psychologists who want to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students and teachers. Their aim is to motivate students to study and increase the use of effective study and teaching strategies that are backed by research. I’ve met Yana Weinstein PhD at an education conference in Southampton last week – she’s the real deal!

Retrieval Practice: what is it?

Retrieval practice is when you make your brain recall information from memory, and then do something with that information.

Retrieval Practice: why?

By forcing your brain to recall information from memory, it strengthens the connection in the long term memory and makes it easier to remember it next time. Failure to retrieve information also helps. If you can’t remember an important piece of information, fact or idea, it tells you that you need to re-learn it carefully so you can retrieve it next time.

Retrieval Practice: how do I do it?

 

Flashcards are particularly useful. Write a concept or keyword on one side, and the definition on the reverse. Alternatively, write a question on one side, and the answer on the other. Look at the front and remember the information on the reverse. Don’t be tempted to flip the card – if you do, you’re just reading the information, not recalling it from memory, and this isn’t helping with retrieval.

Retrieval Practice: next steps

Testing yourself is difficult! Don’t worry if you find it hard. The struggle is actually making the connections in your brain more secure. Follow the advice above and it will get easier – but if you cheat and look at the answers, you aren’t securing those connections to your memory.

It’s also vital to check that you’ve recalled information correctly, otherwise you might be cementing incorrect definitions and ideas into your memory!

Retrieval Practice: watch the video

In this video, the Learning Scientists explain about retrieval practice:

 

Happy revising!

How to revise: techniques that work

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loverevision

We love revision…right?

Revision – it really matters. But, with the best will in the world, it’s not the most exciting way to spend your time. The process itself requires you to look back at work you’ve already done – to “re-vision” it – to try and remember it and commit it to memory. There’s nothing “new” in it. But the trick to making it effective is to get your brain working as hard as it can be.

The reason for this is best summed up by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham. Willingham says:

Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember. Memory is the residue of thought. 

In other words, you need your brain to really be processing the information you are trying to revise, if you want to stand any chance of remembering it.

What doesn’t work?

There are a few techniques that seem effective – but actually aren’t. These include:

  • Highlighting
  • Re-reading
  • Summarising
highlighting

Highlighting: expectation vs reality

These techniques allow information to pass through your brain without much thinking. Covering pages of A4 with beautifully highlighted patches might make you feel like you’ve achieved something, but it won’t actually help you to remember the information. These are low challenge activities, and therefore low impact

What does work?

Practice Testing

This technique is pretty straightforward – keep testing yourself (or each other) on what you have got to learn.  This technique has been shown to have the highest impact in terms of supporting student learning.  Some ways in which you can do this easily:

  • Create some flashcards, with questions on one side and answers on the other – and keep testing yourself.
  • Work through past exam papers – many can be acquired through exam board websites.
  • Simply quiz each other (or yourself) on key bits of information.
  • Create ‘fill the gap’ exercises for you and a friend to complete.
  • Create multiple choice quizzes for friends to complete.

Distributed Practice

forgetting curve

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – if you revisit newly learned information, you remember more of it

Rather than cramming all of your revision for each subject into one block, it’s better to space it out – from now, through to the exams.  Why is this better?  Bizarrely, because it gives you some forgetting time.  This means that when you come back to it a few weeks later, you will have to think harder, which actually helps you to remember it.  Furthermore, the more frequently you come back to a topic, the better you remember it.

Elaborate Interrogation

One  of the best things that you can do (either to yourself or with a friend) to support your revision is to ask why an idea or concept is true – and then answer that why question.  For example:

  • In science, increasing the temperature can increase the rate of a chemical reaction….why?
  • In geography, the leisure industry in British seaside towns like Porthcawl in South Wales has deteriorated in the last 4 decades….why?
  • In history, the 1929 American stock exchange collapsed.  This supported Hitler’s rise to power….why?

So, rather than just try to learn facts or ideas, ask yourself why they are true.

Self explanation

Rather than looking at different topics from a subject in isolation, try to think about how this new information is related to what you know already.  This is where mind- maps might come in useful – but the process of producing the mind map is probably more useful than the finished product.  So, think about a key central idea (the middle of the mind map) and then how new material, builds on the existing knowledge in the middle.

Alongside this, when you solve a problem e.g. in maths, explain to someone the steps you took to solve the problem.  This can be applied to a whole range of subjects.

Interleaved revision

When you are revising a subject, the temptation is to do it in ‘blocks’ of topics.  Like this:

revisionblocked

The problem with this is, is that it doesn’t support the importance of repetition – which is so important to learning (see distributed practice above!)  So rather than revising in ‘topic blocks’ it’s better to chunk these topics up in your revision programme and interleave them:

revisioninterleaved

This means that you keep coming back to the topics.  So, instead of doing a one hour block of revision on topic 1, do 15 minutes on topic 1, then 15 minutes on topic 2, then the same for topic 3 and 4. The next day, do the same. On day three – just to spice it up and stop your brain getting into a rut – mix up the topics!

Have a break

Your brain can only work effectively for so long. Scientists differ on this – some say our attention span is around 20 minutes, whilst others say we can work for longer. My advice is to revise in blocks of around 45 minutes, giving yourself a 15 minute break in each hour to recharge. Make sure you get some fresh air, relax and switch off. You don’t want to underachieve because you haven’t done enough revision – but equally, you need to stay healthy and happy if you’re going to do your best, so don’t overdo it!

Resources

There are lots of resources out there to help you revise. Here are just a few:

Good luck!

 

With thanks to Shaun Allison for the inspiration  and some of the images for this blog. Read Shaun’s original post here.