If you are in your GCSE years or about to embark on your journey into GCSE and stressing out, unsure how to go about revising, then worry no more! Many before you have been in the same situation and I can give you some advise that will hopefully help you revise effectively for your GCSE’s and potentially any tests taken in the further.
First thing you should know is that everyone studies differently and some methods may suit you learning style and yet other technique may fail you! Here are some different types of techniques that you should consider trying out! Don’t stop at one, try all four and see which one works best for you. Baring in mind that your may choose a different technique depending on the subjects you study!
Revision cards: this is really helpful in many fields and I personally used these for most of my subject’s - mainly science. This method makes life easier when you have 1000s of different quotes and technical words to memorise. You can flick through your different piles of cards during your journeys to school and back, before exams and during breaks. Studies have shown that reading over something you want to memories before you go to sleep is effective! [I’ll upload that study soon on the blog, so make sure to check back again! 📷 ]
Another tip that may help you even more with revision cards is colour coding them, so perhaps using a red pen to write certain keywords, and blue pen for key quotes. Use different coloured cards to separate your different subjects - so have physics on yellow card, chemistry on red card and biology on blue card. > This will save you time when you've had a bad day and just thrown your cards straight into your bag without thinking about them getting mixed up!
Read, cover, and recall: this is mainly for subjects like sociology, PE, RE, English and foreign languages as they require you to learn a variety of key vocabulary. This is where you read out the word you need to learn cover it then recall it. You may remember doing this back in primary school when given may words for spellings. To ensure you have remembered the words, test yourself on another day and redo the process for the words you don't remember and then redo the test for all the words and see if you remember them all. Whether you remembered all the words or not, make sure you keep at least 10 minutes every day dedicated for this process as this will ensure that you still remember the words before exams season!
Story line: This method is usually effective for subjects that require you to remember dates and the names of place such as history, geography, religious studies and english. You may choose to use A3 paper which would allow many different information to fit or A5/6 paper which would be more convenient to fit into your pocket like a revision card. So for history your could draw out a timeline and have event titles in one colour and dates in a different colour, or you may choose to separate the events by having them all in different colours and their dates matching the events’ colour. For geography you could link the name of the city, country, river, hurricane with something that rhymes, or something that place is famous for and you found interesting.
Posters: making posters is a fun and effective way to remember quotes in English, for example if you are studying Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde you could draw a poster for quotes then a poster for themes and extra. The poster doesn't necessarily have to have images, even though this may help those who are visual learns. Your poster could vary from large diagrams to small cloud bubbles of quotes!
Hope the above is helpful! Please do comment below your questions, suggestions and any ideas you have for future blogs