How to Revise

Revise means see again. We expect you to revise throughout year 7,  8 and 9.  You will have a test every half term and you could be asked questions on anything you have learnt  in Key Stage 3 on each test.  Teachers constantly tell students to revise but don’t always tell or show them how! I am going to reveal to you the most effective study strategy and then we will look at some different ways to use it.

Teachers spend a lot of time trying to get information into students’ heads; retrieval (the most effective study strategy for remembering information) is practising getting information out without any clues to help. There are lots of simple ways to use retrieval as a revision tool. The three most important are:

1.Self-quizzing

2.Knowledge Splats

3.Flashcards

These are not effective revision strategies and you should not do them

1. Reading text books or notes in your exercise book.

2. Copying out notes, with your notes in front of you, or highlighting sections of your notes.

3. Watching Revision Videos

Click here for help on setting yourself Educake Tests to revise specific topics you have studied in Key Stage 3

You can also self quiz using the method of look-cover-write- check

• Look: read the information

• Cover what you have read.

• Write down everything from the information you have read.

• Check: take a different colour pen and look back at the information. If you have missed anything out or written anything down incorrectly, change it with your different colour pen and make a note of the parts you struggled to remember 

The front page of this Google Site contains a large number of resources you can use for self quizzing. The summary sheets, word sheets and knowledge organisers on the front page of this site are all excellent for this  purpose. 

Knowledge Splats

This one is really simple: take a blank piece of paper (no cheating by looking at your notes) and write down everything you can remember about  a particular topic.  Take a look at the knowledge organiser for that topic to see if there is anything you have missed.

FLASH CARDS

Many students use flashcards. That’s great! But here’s a surprise: it’s not always effective retrieval practice.

• Students actually “cheat” themselves by flipping cards over too early and dropping cards out of their deck too quickly. 

• Here are three key tips to make flashcards more powerful (use the mnemonic "lather, rinse, repeat" to help you remember).

1) Retrieve: You should make sure you are retrieving the answer. Write down the answer or say it out loud before flipping the card over. This holds you accountable and ensures you retrieve, rather than falling for the illusion of confidence – thinking “of course I know it” and flipping the card over prematurely.

2) Re-order: You should shuffle their deck each time they go through it to challenge themselves with spacing and interleaving, instead of going through their flashcard deck in the same order again and again.

3) Repeat: Yous should keep cards in their deck until you’ve correctly retrieved it three times. We know from research that students have a tendency to remove their cards too early, so by ensuring students keep a card in their deck three times,

Many students are turning to flash card apps for flashcards, like Kahoot, Quizlet, and Anki. We have uploaded all the retrieval roulette questions for every topic to the studystack.com flashcard website. Enter Davenant Foundation School Key Stage 3 Science in  the search bar of this website to find them and use the flash cards for the topics you want to revise. We have  made a video explaining how Studystack.com works and how it should be properly used to help practice retrieval. The video is here (Note the narration of the video starts after 28 seconds) 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_DxNg_sOoXBzn-hcdDiyOHQBhwoLhEF_/view?usp=sharing

Many students prefer to have Flash Cards to hold in their hand rather than use a Flash Card App or website.  If that is you then you can either buy yourself a set from CGP or print off a free set from this site.

Click here to the CGP website to buy sets of flash cards. 

Click here for a complete set of Flash Cards which are free which you can download as a series of pdfs and then print 

You can also print off the flash cards from the study stack website