Concentrating And remembering

Concentrating and remembering

The square of the hypotenuse is equal to… the square of the hypotenuse is equal… the square…

An old teacher of mine swore by a very particular (and in my opinion, totally mad) study habit. She said that if you read something through three times, then at the end of the third time, you would know all of the information it contains perfectly. For her, it worked – she could sit quietly reading a chapter of a textbook, and then after the third time through, answer pretty much any question about it. For me, this is the worst possible way to revise. My concentration span is that of a particularly dim goldfish. I can sit for hours, re-reading the same piece of text up to five, six, or seven times, without ever once taking in what it says. Sure, my eyes will be drifting over the words, but my mind will be elsewhere entirely – thinking about what Im going to have for lunch, what happened on last nights Made in Chelsea, what Im going to revise next, or even how terrified I am about the exam. And even if I do manage to remember the general gist of the passage, by the next day any specific details have totally disappeared. If Im going to have any chance of taking something in and remembering it for longer than ten minutes, I have to make learning an active process. Here are some ideas to do this:

Set yourself questions

In subjects like History, English, Religious Studies, Psychology, or Biology, where youve got to read and learn long swathes of text, make learning active by turning information into questions. Break a text down into chunks of one page, or roughly 500 words each, and for each part, write out five questions that you would ask if you were an examiner testing students on that part. Next, write out the answers. Take your time over this process – your questions should be careful and well thought-out, isolating the most important elements of a topic. You could even put your questions on flash cards, and use them to revise from in the future.

Teach each other

If you can reframe your knowledge so your peers can understand it, you should be able to do the same for an examiner.

In groups of two, three, or four, break a subject (or some of a subject) down into parts, each go off and learn a part thoroughly, and then come back together and teach each other what youve learned. The ‘teacher could prepare a slide-show and a handout, explain how to answer past paper questions, and ask the other members of the group to work through some questions together. This method of revision works brilliantly for a few reasons: first, its active, forcing you to confront problems rather than skipping over them, and transform information into a form someone else will understand; second, its fun, and social, giving you a break from the solitary confines of your spot in the library. It can be adjusted to suit pretty much any subject: in Economics or History, you could each take an essay question, prepare a model answer and discuss it with the group; in a literature exam, you could provide readings and summaries of books or poems; in Maths or a science, teach a whole topic.

Ditch the books altogether

Some students do exceedingly well in exams without ever making revision notes or even reading through their books – instead, revision for them is a process of going through every past paper in existence, and answering all the questions there. Next, get hold of a mark scheme, read through the exemplary answers contained there, and work out how youve scored and where youve gone wrong. I used to use this method in subjects like Maths and Chemistry. My first efforts were always a total disaster, with scores in the forties and fifties – but I found it astonishing how many questions were repeated in slightly altered form from paper to paper, and how much I improved each time. Whats more, each time I would read through the answers on the mark scheme, I was learning information in the same way as I would from a text book, building confidence and becoming familiar with the particular demands of the paper – but it was easier to concentrate than if Id used notes, because I was always comparing the answers there to my own efforts. Whats more, in my experience, if you puzzle over something and get it wrong, youre likely to remember how to do it properly. Of course, with this system of revision its crucial to be alert to changes in the syllabus, and there is always a risk of missing out something important – but its a great way of livening up revision and can always be combined with other methods to make it more thorough.

N.B. When practising, remember to keep to the amount of time youll have in an exam.

Try something new

There are also a huge variety of comedy songs out there, designed to help you memorise facts in a more entertaining way.

There are radio shows and podcasts on basically everythingthese days. I revised for my Shakespeare exam at university by listening to a really useful podcast on iTunes – and a quick search confirms there are hundreds more geared towards IB, A-level, and GCSE exams. Dont feel confined to those specifically for your course, though – you can learn new and interesting information that might boost your grade and give your exam an edge simply by searching for a topic youre interested in. Downloading and listening to these will give you a fresh perspective, or a new way of understanding a topic – and in addition, is a more low-key method of revising – something you can do while youre walking to school, sitting on the tube or relaxing in the evening.

Make something

I know a student who put everything she needed to know about Photosynthesis for IB Biology into a brilliant (but incredibly geeky) rap. And another student who made extravagant and actually quite beautiful posters, writing all the information she wanted to remember about World War Two on different parts of a map of Europe. If youre especially creative, or learn well from seeing, speaking or doing, you can adapt this to suit how you learn – making acronyms, rhymes or posters – or even acting things out to remember them better.