How can I help my child with revision?

As we approach the Christmas holidays, many students across the country are gearing up to revise for their mock exams that might be happening in the next few weeks, or after Christmas. At The Kingsley School, we have had our Year 11 successfully navigate a GCSE in Mathematics already, and both Year 11 and Year 13 are looking forward to a range of mock exams in January. Each year group is also spending every day learning, trying hard to remember facts, figures and concepts and apply them to ever complex questions as they go through their learning journey. As such, it is a great time of year to take stock, reflect on what learning is and think about how we can support our daughters to make progress during their private study at home.

The Science of Learning

In our parent workshop on “Revision Techniques” that was held before half term, I showed the following video clip which adequately shows the process of learning that students go through every day. Here we watch a skateboarder attempt to learn how to complete a specific trick and can observe real learning in action.

What learning looks like (clean) 

This video provides us with some points of reflection that are important to recognise as we explain the learning process.

Learning is non-linear. There are times when things get worse before they get better. In this case, there is a clear distinction between success and failure, but in many cases it can be more nuanced. However, the learning process is not a continual process of small victories, but a spectrum of success and failure along the way.

Learning is emotional. We can see this at home when our children are decompressing from a hard day. We see this when preparing for exams and the additional stress and anxiety they cause. This emotional response is normal, but can be managed carefully.

Progress is not always visible, but the appearance of progress is vital to student wellbeing.

Purposeful deliberate practice is key to success. There must be a time when we work on the skills required to succeed. This might be practising quadratic equations in maths, of mole calculations in chemistry, or the learning of a new instrument. This makes up a significant part of learning away from the classroom and is a vital ingredient in any successful revision programme.

Kindness is also important. This may be kindness to oneself- understanding that learning takes time and is not always successful. Similarly, kindness is evident every time we offer positive support. I imagine that the camera crew were as invested in the stunt as the skateboarder was, and offered words of encouragement to keep him going. This is a major part of learning both in school and at home.

The problem with thinking

Daniel Willingham, in his book “Why do children not like school?”, made the observation that:

“People’s minds are not especially well suited to thinking; thinking is slow, effortful and uncertain… Nevertheless, we find successful thinking pleasurable”.

In other words, as human beings we like to think, but not it if it’s too difficult. This is an important part of the learning process. Teachers at Kingsley will consider this carefully and make sure that the perception of challenge is just right to increase learning and motivation. Skilled teachers can offer scaffolding and support if it appears too difficult, and slowly remove that scaffolding away when the student becomes more confident.

When students are preparing for examinations, there is a natural tendency to be overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge to be learned, the number of subjects and all the difficult tasks involved. However, breaking this down into small chunks makes the process more manageable. This could be through a specific topic in the exam specification, or a specific skill and action. Other methods of managing this could include breaking revision up by time; perhaps 25 minutes work, 5 minutes rest (or any other variation that works for your daughter, such as 45:15). This keeps attention on the working time and allows some space and decompression between efforts. Over the course of an evening, a few cycles of work and rest can increase productivity significantly.

It is also important to consider how difficult it is to focus on revision and the task at hand in the first place. At the end of a long school day, students’ minds may prefer to focus on what gives them pleasure in the short term rather than working towards a longer term, abstract goal of success in exams. In addition to breaking up the content into chunks, it is equally vital to remove distractions. This is because we only have a certain amount of capacity for thinking at any given time; our brains continually filter out lots of information, but only because most of us can only focus on one complex problem at any one time. To understand this more, we need to consider the long term /short term memory model.

Long term and short term memories

Something can be defined as “learning” if there has been a change to long term memory. This comes from the model of memory that is detailed by the diagram below:

Our attention and cognition relies on the short term memory. This is variable between different people, but psychologists note that we can remember between 6-8 things at any one time. Try it by trying to remember a list of names, numbers or abstract facts. However, our long-term memory is unlimited. Once a fact is learned – passed into long term memory- it is retrievable and usable again and again. This is how our brains work to process large amounts of information; we can handle more in the short-term store if we are processing what we have learned previously. When we first start learning to drive, we have to think about lots of things at once, such as the mechanics of the car, coordination of the movements, traffic, pedestrians and so on. Trying to practice changing gears whilst looking at traffic is problematic. However, when we have the movement of changing gear in our long-term memory, much more of our attention can be focused on traffic, pedestrians and what is happening around us. Our brain does not need to filter so much out in order to manage the core task.

Therefore, to think about what this means for revision at home:

Please remove complex distractions. It’s not possible to process and learn whilst watching TV, despite what our children tell us! This is because less of the processing energy is focusing on the notes being made and trying to think about multiple complex problems at once. The exception to this would be if one task is ‘mundane’ and therefore automatic. Learning and revision can still happen when listening to a podcast and cleaning the kitchen floor.

Similarly, learning only happens when attention is focused on it. As such, a learning environment created at home should be quiet and relatively free of visual distractions. Writing notes and sticking them onto the wall only has a limited impact- our brains will filter out what it thinks it doesn’t need to know. As such, the notes only mean something if we can focus on them.

Recognise fatigue- if the working memory is ‘full’, it’s time to rest. There needs to be some decompression or relaxation before further learning can take place. This is a further reason why the chunking method works so well.

Finally, deliberate practice and consistent repetition are required to help knowledge transfer from the short-term memory to the long term one. Regular quizzing, testing and revision is much more productive than leaving it to one singular revision session. Little and often works for a variety of reasons.

Some practical examples

Taking into account all of the above, successful students need to:

Build the habits and routines to regularly engage with revision

Regularly practice recalling information from memory. The transfer between long term memory and short term memory is improved with regular practice; this means that trying to remember something improves the quality of memory in the long term.

Once learned apply the knowledge to worked examples and past exam questions, and review these with advice from mark schemes and teachers.

Building habits and routines

The best way to do this is to plan. Many tools are available for this but a simple planner can work wonders. Getrevising.com require you to create an account, but they will help build on here: Revision Timetable Maker / Study Planner

However, a simple diary can work just as well. Students should plan their week with the non-negotiables first. What are their commitments with clubs and activities? When is sports practice? What day of the week is the family meal? All those things should be blocked out on the timetable to make sure that there is appropriate balance.

The next step would be to schedule realistic revision sessions, perhaps chunking into 2-3 hour blocks made up of those 30 minute sessions. When these blocks are in place, it is time to assign a subject- and then a topic- to them. Working back from the start of the mock exams, it is best to make sure there is a balance of subjects when a number of weeks out from the exam, and to become progressively more specialised as the exam comes closer.

Parents can help support the process of building the revision planner and make sure that the periods of revision are realistic and workable. From that, the planner helps to focus the conversation when it comes to starting revision- if this is something that parents and students have worked on together, it is much easier to help them stick to it over the longer term.

Recall practice

As noted above, trying to remember something is key to the learning process. Continually re-reading notes means that we are never trying to think about remembering them. As such, this leads to a low retention rate. However, trying to recreate notes from memory is very powerful. When complete, the ‘from memory’ notes can be compared to the original and it is clear what has been retained. Repeating this process- purposeful deliberate practice– is what underpins learning.

Using flashcards to shorten notes, or to create quizzes, can equally work very well. Imagery and colour helps to stimulate memories, which make them far easier to recreate. Encourage your daughter to be creative and use pictures, symbols and cartoons as these will help aid the memory process.

The Leitner Box method is a very prescriptive way of learning that can work very well for a specific and defined test. When working towards 3 A-levels or 10 GCSEs it can become very cumbersome, but the principles work. Have a look at this video, Leitner System for Flashcards and see if it will work for your daughter. If it doesn’t in this form, that is absolutely fine, but the principles are sound: regular, spaced practice that requires students to recall from memory is the key ingredient to success.

Applying knowledge

Once the knowledge is in the long term memory, this is the best time to apply it to past exam questions. This is a really valuable revision tool that can help students to understand what the demands of the questions are and how to answer them effectively. This works really well when coupled with feedback from a teacher, other students or the mark scheme. Please refer to resources provided by subject teachers for this; as with everything, regular practice makes perfect!

Final thoughts

Overall, we know that revision for exams, whether they are mocks or the real thing, can be a very stressful time. We can reduce that stress by understanding how the learning process works, planning carefully and prioritising recall practice and finishing this process with applied practice on exam questions. However, like our skateboarder earlier, kindness and positive support is the key to success for every individual, whatever it looks like for them!