General Guide to GCSE Revision
With GCSE’s having finished for many, the pressure now lies on the next cohort of students who will undergo the exams next year. As a result, this short guide aims to relieve some of this pressure by providing some tips on how to undergo revision.
The key ideas to be discussed below are:
Active recall
The Importance of Understanding
Note-taking
First of all, active recall must be implemented during revision in order to learn and retain the content you revise, allowing you to study effectively. The term may not seem familiar to some, yet the concept is very simple. What it requires is that you’re making sure that you are using your memory alone in order to revise and ‘recall’ the information which you learn. This can involve: flashcards, mindmaps produced from memory, and answering past paper questions/questions in general on the topic. For example, if you wanted to learn the definition of different terms in chemistry, you could place the term on one side of a flashcard and the definition on the other. This way, you are testing yourself and seeing if you know the different terms.
Understanding a topic is also key to better revision at GCSE. Making sure that you know and understand what you are learning can massively help when you come to revise it again. One example is Biology, where there are long processes which you must learn and understand, such as Protein Synthesis. Yet this is made much easier if you can understand the process and why one thing leads to another. To help understand a topic, a textbook can help, as well as even getting a simpler explanation from a teacher.
Finally, many students regard taking notes as a form of revision, but personally, I don’t think so. Note-taking for many students is a means to condense their class books into a form which they can easily read and revise from. However, this is very time-consuming, and can be costly for revision time. One tip is for students to write their notes during class time, in their class books. Instead of writing separate notes for revision at home, make it so that the information that your teacher tells you to write down is written in a simplified note form (bullet points and sub-headings). Many teachers in schools urge their students to note down information in whatever form seems best for them, so why not follow their advice. (Of course, always make sure to follow what your teacher informs you to do, to make sure that you are complying to their standards).
Lastly, make sure that you gain some rest, since GCSE’s are tough, and whilst lots of revision is advised, make sure that it is done in moderation and that you don’t burn out!
Thank you for reading,
@The Study Blog
