Do You Really Know, If You Can’t Remember?
To succeed at exams, students need to know how to learn. Simply presenting them with great information is not enough if this is not absorbed.
Unless they’re equipped with effective revision strategies, they will merely default to last minute ‘cramming’, caffeine-fuelled revision sessions and aimless reading, highlighting and re-reading. All unhelpful, ineffective practices that don’t serve them well.
If we are to help students become independent learners, rather than simply getting them to focus on the subject matter, we must help them become better ‘revisers’. That means steering them away from passive and superficial techniques that consume their time but deliver little in return. (Quigley, 2016). My own experience working with pupils and researching material for Veema Education’s Student Brain Booster Masterclass workshops has shown me that effective, practical revision strategies are thin on the ground.
However, by exploring the realms of neuroscience and the science of learning, it’s possible to identify evidence-based techniques that do encourage more effective learning. This is a short list of some.
This is one of the most effective ways to develop learning fluency. (Dunlosky, 2013). It requires students to test their knowledge by reading a text and then answering a series of questions about it. These can either be prepared by a teacher beforehand or by students themselves. Knowing they are about to test each other is a wonderful tool for encouraging student engagement.
By adding higher order thinking questions, you can make this low-stake testing more challenging by stimulating students to consider how new learning relates to what they already know.
These are a fantastic tool for reconstructing information and revealing links and connections between material. By using mind maps, spider maps, sequential thinking and Venn diagrams, students can assess their levels of recall while demonstrating their thinking and understanding of key ideas and topics.
Another very effective way to determine degrees of knowledge, understanding and memory, through research (Hartwig and Dunlosky, 2012) shows that 30% of students don’t use them.
There are a number of ways to self-test with flashcards.
You can write a concept or key term on one side, then use the other to express your understanding of it. Self-quizzing like this is a good technique for identifying gaps in knowledge. Or, as they read, students can note down keywords, concepts, theories onto a set of flashcards, which they can use for later self-testing. Alternatively, they could use both words and images to represent a key concept, writing their explanation on the rear of the flashcard.
I always advise students not to drop flashcards from their pack too soon. Instead, they should keep self-testing and revisit even the topics they feel confident with as often as possible in the run-up to exams.
I’m a great advocate of this system, as are the many GCSE and A-level students I’ve introduced it to. Cornell note taking gets students to think metacognitively (McCabe 2011[ 2011]), by asking questions, writing down key terms and summarising content. Used at the end of lessons or during independent study, it’s highly effective for self-testing recently covered content and bringing this together with previously learned material.
If they are to hang onto knowledge, students must be continuously exposed to information acquired from earlier lessons and homework. Regular, focused, shorter sessions separated by brain breaks are key to effective revision, not hours of cramming in the final days before exams.
That makes daily low-stake testing, weekly reviews and cumulative testing vitally important in helping students store information in their long-term memory.
Research by Cedepa and others (2008) shows the optimal interval between study sessions for information to be retained. This should be every one to two days in the first week, rising to every three weeks for the next six months, and then every four weeks through the year.
As I tell my students ‘little and often’ is what works.
Answering a range of examination questions repeatedly and often is much better than answering single questions in one-off or irregular sessions. By writing down their own answers and tackling worked examples, students will become much better equipped to revise in ways that lead to exam success.
Sadly, there are no magic tricks for retaining information. Knowledge only enters the brain and stays there through hard work and continuous effort. The reality is that learning which feels difficult is much better at embedding knowledge than that which feels easy.
The above techniques work so well because they encourage students to become active agents in their own learning by making them think harder about the information in front of them. In other words, what is easily acquired is soon forgotten. A lesson we, and our students, would do well to remember.
Costa Constantinou is the Director of Educational Services of Veema Education. Costa is Veema’s driving force and has many years of experience both within the classroom and at leadership level. He understands firsthand the needs and priorities of schools today and has led national and international keynotes and workshops on improving teaching and learning, leadership in schools and implementing and managing effective change.
Costa passionately advocates that professional development is a requisite tool for teachers to engage with pedagogy, offer collaborative working partnerships, challenge and advance existing practice. Taken together these sharpen our ability to focus on how we teach and how pupils learn — a reflective approach that at its core sees learning through the eyes of the learner.
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