Tuesday 26 April 2022

Bitesize Research: Supporting Revision & Exam Preparation

By Jaya Carrier

I hope everyone’s had a great week so far! As we draw closer to exams, I wanted to get in touch about some recent work from the Education Endowment Foundation about supporting effective revision using the EEF’s evidence-based work on metacognition and self-regulated learning. Objectives: To use evidence-based methods to support student revision and exam preparation. Summary:

  • The EEF propose the explicit teaching of revision strategies as teachers cannot assume that students will be strong independent learners or know how to revise independently.
  • They advocate the use of a seven-step model, as summarised below:
    1. Activating prior knowledge
    2. Explicit strategy instruction
    3. Modelling of learned strategy
    4. Memorisation of strategy
    5. Guided practice
    6. Independent practice
    7. Structured reflection

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

  • How do I currently support students to improve their metacognition and ability to revise independently?
  • Which parts of the seven-step model do I use already? Which do I need support with to secure them into my practice? What might this support look like?
  • How can I scaffold and support students to prepare for their exams in these final stages? If you would like to discuss this further with me please get in touch! I’d be delighted to hear from you!


2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing Jaya, as always. To what extent do WA practices typically reflect the EEF model, do you think? Something for us to chat about!

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  2. Thanks Jaya, this made me think about the recent workshop we ran with y10 that covered exactly this, giving students explicit instruction as to what revision is and what they should do. I think that teachers demonstrating revision mind maps and how to take notes after watching videos, for example, could be very powerful. But it needs to be accompanied by the thought process that the teacher is going through... Making notes is easy for us to do but not so much for teenagers who have no idea what this looks like when successfully done!

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