Memory and Recall
GCSE and A Level courses all have exams at the end of the course. This means that there is a lot of information that you must be able to recall in an exam situation. To do this successfully, at the end of Y11 and the end of Y13, you must learn and practice memory and recall techniques throughout your school years. Below is a guide to the Redhill Effective Revision Cycle to support you with your revision.
The Effective Revision Cycle
Effective revision is an on-going process. At Redhill we believe that this should be made up of five stages as shown in the diagram. Continue reading below for details of how to make the most of each stage.
Make
Transfer the skills, knowledge and understanding you need for your exams into a revision resource that is easy to use.
Possible strategies include:
Flash cards
Mind maps
Cheat sheets
Turn over cards
Information Organisers
Mnemonics
Roman room / Greek loci
Fold and flip
Body pegs
Flash Cards
Flash cards are a small collection of information that has got all the key details carefully summarised.
Some key criteria for creating effective flashcards:
Use colours to represent different things (e.g. red is for ideas you might forget, green for explanation, blue for statistics)
Don’t use full sentences
Underline keywords and spellings
Use images if they help you to remember
Ideas of ways that you can use flash cards include
Keywords and definitions
Questions and answers
Exam questions and marks schemes
Exam technique cards; ‘How to’ cards with a question and answer
Examples
Flashcards KS3
Flashcards KS4
Flashcards KS5
Memorise
Dedicate explicit time to actively commit this information to memory.
Possible strategies include:
Self/peer/parent testing
Active retrieval (collective memory)
Turn over games
Leitner boxes
Text to pictures
Red/black pen
Practice
Revision needs to involve doing something. Do as many practise questions as you can. Ideally use exam questions for this.
Test
Regularly test yourself ideally with exam papers.
Review
Reflect on your performance in tests to help you identify the areas that you still need to work on.
