Exams: Prepare to succeed

A message from the Headmaster

Dear Sixth Form students and parents,

With the next set of mock examinations fast upon us, I hope Year 12 & 13 will find this QE Update from Mrs Macdonald, our Deputy Head (Academic), helpful. It's full of useful tips, hints and guidance on how to revise, while also explaining the educational rationale - why we attached such importance to having regular exams. I suggest you save this email somewhere safe, so you can easily refer to it again in the future. (It can also be found on our main School website in the News & Views menu.)

I wish all the boys the best of luck!

Neil Enright

Headmaster

To all Year 12 & 13 students

The benefits of regular testing

Professor of Educational Psychology Barak Rosenshine (Principles of Instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Education, Spring 2012)

Many educational research studies show the benefits of regular testing for long-term learning. Prof Rosenshine analysed educational research and found it showed that students undertaking regular quizzes and tests performed better in final exams than those who did not. With regular testing comes regular revision. And the combination of tests and revision strengthens learning because you have to review information and practise skills, including retrieving information from your memory. Do that regularly and the knowledge, understanding and skills you learnt during lessons become connected in a network of ideas in your long-term memory. Further review and practice strengthen the connections between ideas and also form new connections for new ideas. This networking of ideas in your long-term memory frees up your working memory, which has limited capacity, for problem-solving, thinking, and creating – all very important for successful learning in lessons and performance in exams.

In addition to benefiting your long-term memory and learning, well-designed tests provide high-quality evidence of your current performance in each subject. The marks and grades achieved by you in tests tell your teacher what you can currently achieve working independently, and how close you are to achieving your potential (i.e. your minimum target level or grade). Our red, amber and green colour coding system helps your teachers to monitor your progress, and is also reported to your parents to allow them to do the same. Perhaps more importantly, the completed tests also allow your teachers to provide you with useful advice – feedback – to support your learning and progress in each subject and to enable you to achieve higher marks in future assessments. The tests that you complete help you and your teachers to identify your strengths and areas for development.

Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at UCL

However, it is worth emphasising that the tests you complete will only yield these beneficial outcomes if they are an honest reflection of the work you can produce independently on an unseen test. Behaviours including speaking to friends to find out about the content of tests in advance or copying during a test are unhelpful because the work produced is no longer an honest reflection of what you can do. As Professor Wiliam says: “The starting point for effective feedback is eliciting the right evidence.” Your teachers can only provide helpful feedback if the work they mark is an honest reflection of what you can do.

Finally, regular testing also helps to prepare you for public examinations – the A-levels you will sit in the future. Many students get nervous before exams; many find the process of revising stressful. Nerves and anxiety can impede a student’s ability to think clearly during an exam. We hope that by undertaking a regular programme of testing, you will feel familiar with the emotional experience and feel more confident of your ability to survive the pressure.

I wish you well with your exam preparations and future studies.

Best wishes

Anne Macdonald

Deputy Head (Academic)

How to prepare

Your forthcoming exams are an important part of your learning journey as you prepare for this summer’s public examinations and to enter higher education after you leave the School. They provide an opportunity for you to consolidate, through revision, the knowledge, understanding and skills that you have acquired in each subject.

It is not unusual to feel a little nervous ahead of exams, but please do speak to your form tutor if you are feeling particularly anxious, or to your teachers if you have any specific questions.

Here are some practical tips on the best strategies for success:

Subject-specific advice – Follow strategies and carry out activities suggested on eQE by your subject teachers. To access these, visit the Revision Resource Centre below.

Retrieval practice – Include this in your revision programme. Retrieval practice refers to any activity that trains your brain to generate an answer to a question from memory, which is exactly what you have to do in an exam. The retrieval practice infographic in our Revision Resource Centre below suggests nine practical methods.

Spacing – Spread out your revision over time, rather than ‘cramming’. If all your revision is conducted last-minute – the night before the exam, for example – information stores only in your short-term memory, where it is more likely to be forgotten. But if you space out your revision for each subject, when you then re-visit and re-learn what you have already revised, it is more likely to be transferred to your long-term memory. So, write a revision timetable that allows you to learn a little regularly.

Interleaving – Mix up the subjects you revise each day, and/or mix up the topics you revise within a subject. This will help you to make better links between subjects and topics. The more links you can make between information you are revising for the first time and information you have already revised, the more likely the information will be retained in your long-term memory.

Dual coding – Use both words and pictures in your revision notes. This helps you memorise content, because it provides two access points into the brain’s long-term memory.

What not to do!

You should avoid these strategies, which have been identified as ineffective in recent educational research:

Cramming – Not only are you likely to forget what you revise (for the reasons set out in the retrieval practice section above), but cramming also usually leads to stress, an emotion which is counter-productive for exam success.

Re-reading notes – Countless educational studies have proven that students who use re-reading as their main revision strategy achieve lower marks in exams. Re-reading often leads to skim reading and students fail to process (think deeply about) any of the content. As a consequence, it does not become embedded in the long-term memory.

Distractions – Simply having a mobile phone out whilst revising causes a decrease in concentration and a reduction in performance of 20%. More alarmingly still, students who revise whilst listening to music with lyrics perform 60% worse than those revising in a quiet environment. Not convinced? Take a look at our infographic The one about revising to music below.

Revision Resource Centre

Advice at a glance

Here are some helpful infographics prepared by the specialist mindset coaching company, InnerDrive, to help students revise effectively.

Take it from us!

Watch short, high-quality videos from peer mentors on eQE. You may find these three particularly relevant at this time:

Subject-by-subject

Click on the link below to go to the subject pages on eQE, where you can navigate to subject-specific revision advice and activities.