Research School Network: Effective Revision An overview of our webinar

Last night we had the pleasure of hosting a webinar focused on effective revision. During the hour long session we were able to explore some of the key research evidence in this area, identify the most effective strategies students should be using when revising and share practical approaches to use at school.

The starting point was considering some key evidence about memory, particularly working memory and long term memory. Working memory stores small amounts of information for a limited period of time; we can only hold a limited number of items at once and different people have different capacities. The aim of revision should be to transfer this information to the long term memory. But working memory can become overloaded meaning that new information is not stored in the long term memory. A quick overview of cognitive load theory was useful here to provide an understanding of how what is happening in the working memory can help us as teachers with the design and presentation of our lessons.

More information about memory and cognitive load can be found in the following free document:

Deans for Impact: The Science of Learning

These two books are also incredibly useful:

Daniel Willingham: Why Don’t Students Like School?

Peps McCrea: Memorable Teaching

The EEF Improving Secondary Science guidance report and the Metacognition and Self-Regulation guidance report both include evidence in this area too. They can be found here.

Our consideration of the most effective revision strategies was based around the work of Dunlosky in Strengthening the Student Toolbox, whose work identifies the most and least effective strategies in this article.

We focused on the following four strategies:

1. Practice testing is all about retrieval practice, where we focus on getting the information out of our memory. In calling information to mind from memory, our memory is strengthened and forgetting is less likely to occur. Dunlosky identifies the way in which practice testing can take a variety of different forms from quizzing to an essay.

2. Distributed practice, also known as spaced practice, is a learning strategy where practice is broken up into a number of shorter sessions over a longer period of time. This is different to massed practice where a topic is studied all together, once.

3. Interleaved practice involves switching between different topics when revising to enable further transfer to the long term memory.

4. Elaborative interrogation focuses on explaining and describing ideas with many details, making connections among ideas you are trying to learn.

More detail about each of these approaches can be found in Dunlosky’s article and also on the Learning Scientists website, which is full of incredibly useful resources.

At Sandringham, we have encapsulated this research into a whole school approach to revision with our Memory Clock, which provides clear, targeted advice to students on how best to manage their learning and revision. Shown below, it provides a model for students to use when planning their revision based on review, practise and check. 

Thank you for joining us in this webinar and for your many interesting questions at the end of the session; we hope you found it informative.

A recording of the webinar can be found below.