Where there is a choice, help them with tactics for choosing the right question to answer. Help students to think about roughly how long they should be spending on each question. If you are making up practice questions, try to make them look as close to the ‘real thing’ as possible. Make sure that the students are really familiar with the style of the exam papers, and that their revision includes a lot of practice. Opening the exam paper is always going to be a nerve-wracking moment, but as teachers, we can help students to feel more confident. This works equally well with factual information and vocabulary, and older students might also enjoy designing their own cards. The last person to answer will be the first student to ask the question. Eventually, all students will have answered and asked a question. The first student starts by asking a question, and then the student with the answer reads their answer out, and then asks their question, which another student has on their card. Students have cards which include a question and the answer to someone else’s question. Play ‘I have…who has…?’ This is a quiz exercise with a twist.I remember once a student saying to me, ‘but if I write the quiz, I’ll know the answers.’ To which my response was, ‘exactly’. They can use the quizzes themselves and share them around. If you have a virtual learning environment (VLE), most of these also include quiz generators.
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Students can do this on paper or use one of the many free online quiz generators or apps. Two strategies I found especially helpful were: Helping students to find active ways of remembering key factual information is really important. My older students used to find this very helpful, and would often request it as a class revision task. A short version of the exercise is a good way to approach questions in an exam as well. Write this up too, in a different colour. You can also ask them to suggest key topics and approaches for the questions. Underline them and write down brief explanations.
Ask your students to say what they think the key words are, and why. You can model this by writing an exam question on the board (or displaying it on an electronic whiteboard). One way of doing this effectively is to use the ‘pen of power’ approach. This will help in the exam itself but it’s also great preparation as it helps students to understand which areas they need to revise in more depth. That way, they can be certain they’ve read it correctly, and they can also think quickly about what material they need to cover. Students need to get into the habit of carefully interrogating a question. This works best for open response questions because students have more freedom to choose wisely. This encourages them to think creatively, has an element of challenge, and trains them in an important aspect of exam technique. The students have to decide how they would make the fact fit into their answer to a question. The other pile contains possible questions.
One pile of cards contains various facts and figures about a topic (this could also include quotations in relevant subjects). One technique which works very well is to set up a card game, which you can play with the whole class or in small groups.
It’s very easy for students to focus on learning ‘lots of stuff’ and ignore how well they apply what they know. Focus on what you knowĪt the beginning of my teaching career I was told that the majority of exam answers contain fairly similar information, and that it was often how well students made use of that information that determined their mark. Here are a few of my favourite strategies for helping students to revise effectively. Even the most relaxed students decide it’s time to study hard, and teachers are often focusing on revision in lessons. In some parts of the world, it’s a time of year when both teachers and students are thinking about exam preparation.
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