Revision memory hacks

Dear colleagues and students,

I am writing to share about revision memory hack from www. s-cool.com that I found very useful, please feel free to comment and share your idea.

Best regards,

Novia Irmawaty

Around this time every year exams loom large on the horizon. Students up and down the country suddenly panic and realise time is very much against them.

The key to successful revision is the right approach and being organised. Ed Cooke, a British ‘memory champion’ at Memrise, suggests the following:

“There are two key strategies that make all the difference in revision. 

 

The first is to test yourself as you revise. The temptation in revision is always to simply read stuff over, again and again. But this is an inefficient strategy: it's much more effective to *practise recalling* the information. So after reading through a page of your text book or revision materials, cover it up and spend five minutes trying to recall it. This way, you'll spot what you don't know better, and strengthen your knowledge much more efficiently.

Secondly, repetition is very important. Memories fade over time, and it's very important to repeat things many times over (with spaces in-between the repetitions) to ensure the best level knowledge.”

Cooke explains that the idea of mems is to make information more memorable. So how do they work?

“Take the example of the Spanish word for table, Mesa. To remember this, you might think of lots of MESS on a TABLE. You might imagine someone (a MESS-ER) messing it all up further. Soon, as soon as you try to think of the Spanish word for table, the image of the mess all over a table will pop into your mind, and you'll remember "mesa". 

Memrise is designed to take all the effort out of revising: it reminds and tests as you go along, all you have to do is answer the questions and you're set. The creative community of users has created a vast number of courses, and there are free-to-use materials for almost all GCSE and A-Level exams.

Also check out Revision Memory Hacks >>>

Students who cram may pass the exam but they don’t retain the material. When they’re going to be taking advanced classes in the subject, they are going to build on the knowledge they’re developing, so I highly recommend distributed practice.”
Technique, description and scores below:
1. Elaborative interrogation Explaining why a stated fact or concept is true.
Effectiveness: Moderate
2. Self-explanation. Explaining how a problem was solved.
Effectiveness: Moderate
3. Summarisation. Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts.
Effectiveness: Low
4. Highlighting/underlining Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading .
Effectiveness: Low
5. Keyword mnemonic. Using a keyword to associate with information.
Effectiveness: Low
6. Imagery. Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening .
Effectiveness: Low
7. Re-reading. Restudying text material again after an initial reading.
Effectiveness: Low
8. Practice testing Self-testing or taking practice tests (e.g: flash cards).
Effectiveness: High
9. Distributed practice A schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time.
Effectiveness: High
10. Interleaved practice.
Switching between different types of problems, within a single study session.
Effectiveness: Moderate.
Disclaimer: S-cool is not suggesting there is a right or wrong way of learning and memorising information. Many students will have their own preferred techniques.
Does this study change your views on your revision techniques? Which ones do you find effective?

s-cool revision