The months of April to June are the most academically intense months for students aged 14-18. Why, you ask? Because of exams. Whether they are end of years, GSCEs, or A Levels. Many teenagers strive to do well in these exams, and so they spend as much time as they are willing to spare obsessively reading notes, making notes, making flashcards, and trying to remember pages and pages of different content. But what I really want to know, as I go into my end of year revision, is how do I revise? How do I revise effectively in ways that suit me? Unlike some people I know, I can’t do hours and hours of revision without long breaks in between. So I did some research, asked around, and have come up with a list of some top tips that most people seem to agree on being the most beneficial strategies to making the most out of revision.  

Make a revision timetable. 

If you are on holiday or study leave like me, find out what you are doing, and plan any meetups that you want to do, and find the spaces in between where you can revise. If you are still at school, you need to find slots in your time after school or on weekends. Putting your plans on a timetable is very helpful as you can see what you are doing and when and how much you want to be revising in advance. Personally, as a visual learner, this is a very useful tool. However, the danger is that you spend too much time making a timetable and no time revising! 

 

The Pomodoro technique 

Revise for 25 minutes, then break for 5 minutes. This is a good technique because 25 minutes is normally the time that a person can put their maximum focus on a task before losing attention. After a few reps – maybe 5 if you can, you then stop and have an even longer break, maybe you might not even want to go back to revising until later on in the day. Breaking this up is very useful and 25 minutes becomes quite short when you think about the fact that in school lessons are 40 minutes, so 25 minutes of revision seems a lot shorter in comparison.  

 

Blurting 

Many friends have recommended this to me. This is when you decide on the topic you want to revise and spend a short amount of time reading the material and revising your notes. You then get yourself a blank piece of paper and pen and, with no notes, you write down absolutely everything that you can remember from that topic. When you are finished, you can then look at your notes and fill in any gaps that you forgot about. This is very helpful as it helps you to see which topics you know better and where the gaps in your knowledge are. It is a very useful retrieval tool, which is good for exams as this is exactly what you need to do in them. A friend of mine, Kate Riontino said that this technique was really good because it ‘forces you to memorise everything and lets you know if you revised it well enough.’ 

 

If you are just starting to revise or have spent a long time looking for good revision advice, I hope that at least one of these tips are helpful to you.