A few semesters have passed and the examinations are coming soon. You may have your own revision techniques when it comes to exam preparation, which may work for some people.

For others, they may be struggling with the information overload after so many months of learning in classes and lessons.

If you are facing difficulties in having revision techniques, here are 6 methods that will help you achieve success in your examinations.

1. How To Use Revision: The Technique Explained. The basic premise of using revision to change your life is that in addition to being able to create your future experiences, you can also use your imagination to re-create past experiences as you wish them to be.
2. 4 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Revise During revision, students should work closely together, discuss models, add details, delete the unnecessary, and rearrange for clarity and effect.
3. 4 Key Revision Tips For Writers. Here are some general tips to getting to your best drafts quickly. Use your spell-check, grammar check, and check your spacing. Run all three of these checks a couple of times, once right after your first draft and once right before you turn your work in. Keep your format simple.

Try a variety of different revision techniques — answering practice questions, writing down notes from memory, and using Revision Guides, Flash Cards, Exam Practice Workbooks etc. CGP have the best revision books money can buy (blatant advert, but you are on our website.) 6. Stick revision notes all around your house.

Study Early & Be Consistent in it

Never start revising at the last minutes. One of the key revision techniques is that you should do it early and frequently. After lessons on a new module have been completed, you should make sure to do revision right after that.

This is because the information is still fresh and new in your brain, and you don’t want to risk losing the familiarity of this knowledge. You can try reading and understanding the beginning of the module, close the book, and test yourself on the concepts and theories of the module.

This is one of the best revision tips anyone should be doing. By ensuring you are internalizing information repeatedly, your brain will naturally “imprint” them deeper and better. Also, you will havelesser stress to cope, which is definitely a great deal of help.

Once your examination is nearing, you would most likely have already understood most of the early chapters of your textbooks, so you can spend more time on the newer and challenging topics.

Set Revision Schedule

Benjamin Franklin once said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” This mindset can be applied to almost anything, which includes revision for examinations. By scheduling your revision, you can be sure that you are conquering exam topics and not miss out any details.

Start by having a calendar, which most smartphones should have, and set dates and time to go through your revision notes and materials. Do remember not to set unrealistic deadlines for yourself to avoid giving yourself unnecessary pressure.

By having a strict and achievable revision timetable, you are already setting yourself for academic success.

Do Past Year Papers

This technique requires you to source for places where you can get quality past papers of the exam to practice. You may approach teachers, study groups, communities or even libraries.

One of the best benefits of this technique is that you can make full use of your revision notes as you apply your knowledge and check the answers that are favorable for the exam board during marking.

By doing past papers, you can know “blind spot” areas where you may have missed important concepts during your revision periods. This is crucial as your exam will most likely cover the topics you have learnt comprehensively. Start sourcing for past papers and revise better for your exam as soon as possible.

Mindmap

If you’re wondering what a mind map is: it is a form of visualized guide that can help you understand your revision guides faster and better.

Did you know that our brain can process images about 60,000 times quicker than text? Although some people may do revision with listing bullet points to help them understand notes better, most people do find it easier with the mind map revision techniques.

Start by drawing your topics of exam and branch out important sub categories. Make notes beside each branch to help you digest the topic’s information better. You can even branch out sub categories further to encompass more concepts.

Sign up for Tutoring lessons

If you are still having problems understanding certain exam topics, then you should join a tuition center that teaches a wide variety of modules and lessons.

One good example of a center is Integral Learning Academy, where it offers Primary to Junior College classes. This is extremely beneficial as you have a new way to revise for your exams especially with tutor’s new holistic teaching methods.

It has also been studied that students who participated in tutoring service had better grade scores than those who didn’t take part at all. As the group is smaller than your usual class in your school, teachers can spend more time and attention on you if you are facing difficulties in your studies.

You can start by finding tutoring centers near you if you prefer convenience. However, be sure to take note of the tutor fees as they may vary widely to fit your budget.

Memory Techniques

There are several ways under the Memory Technique that have helped countless students prepare for their exam.

Canon s900 drivers for mac. One of the ways is Chunking. This works by segmenting your revision notes and creating relationship links with these segments. This is similar to why you can seemingly memorize phone numbers for around 30 seconds as that information is chunked. This helps tremendously as you’re able to recall the important concepts better.

Another memory method is Mnemonics, where you associate your notes with things that can help you remember better. You can try by giving features to something. For example, if you are trying to memorize a person’s name (who happens to have green eyes), you can use phrases like “green-eye Jonathan”. This will help greatly in memorizing quickly and better.

Final Thoughts

It is important for every student to have their own revision techniques when it comes to exam preparation. However, we should keep in mind that having a wide variety of methods is essential in achieving the best results. It is important to check on your progress constantly and see if your strategy needs any adjustments. Nevertheless, start your revision early and you can be sure to achieve academic success in your exam.

Our page Learning Styles describes two different theories of styles of learning: Honey and Mumford’s Activist, Pragmatist, Reflector and Theorist types, and the neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) based Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic system.

We suggested there that it may be easier to learn if you tailor your study to your preferred learning style, but that variety is also important. The most effective learners use multiple styles.

Recognising and using your preferred learning style, and varying your experiences, can make revision easier, less of a chore and more effective.

Our Revision Skills page provides some useful general revision tips. This page applies some of the ideas about learning styles to revision and suggests some suitable revision activities for those with different learning styles and preferences. You may want to try several different activities to keep yourself interested.

Learning Styles Revisited

See our page: Learning Styles for more information.

Honey and Mumford identified four basic styles of learning, which they characterised as:

• Activists – who learn by doing, getting ‘down and dirty’, and trying things out.
• Pragmatists – who are chiefly interested in how ideas can be applied in the ‘real world’.
• Reflectors – who like to reflect on their experience and that of others.
• Theorists – who like to understand how their study fits into a broader theoretical framework.

Very few of us are a pure ‘type’, but each of us has one, or more often two, preferences of learning style and therefore activities which we prefer to do in order to learn.

Tailoring your revision to your learning style can help you to learn more easily.

BUT trying activities that fit different styles can also help to keep you interested in what you are studying, and ensure that you are fully prepared.

Revision Techniques For Students

Revision for Activists

Activists like to ‘do’ in order to learn. They don’t care much for reading or looking at their notes.

If you are an 'Activist Learner', revision activities that may suit you are such things as:

• Writing practice essays or exam questions (and you will almost certainly find that your tutor or teacher will be delighted to mark your practice essays for you if you ask them nicely). This will also work for kinaesthetic learners.
• Summarising notes in the form of mind maps or other memory-jogging diagrams. There is more about mind-mapping and other picture techniques on our page on Creative Thinking that will work for visual learners.
• Taking part in a group discussion or debate on the subject that allows you to explore the ideas and subject with other people, which will be helpful for auditory learners.
• Especially if you’re revising a subject like English Literature where you’re studying a play or poem, walking around the room reading it aloud, or acting it out, either alone or with a friend, can be a great way of getting parts of it to stick in your mind.

Revision for Pragmatists

Pragmatists, more than any other group, are interested in what works. That’s the case for the subject that they’re learning, but it’s also the case for the style of learning too.

One good way for pragmatists to revise is to try to find out what the exam will be like, and then prepare for that.

If you are a 'Pragmatist Learner', revision activities that may suit you are such things as:

Revision Techniques

• Working through old exam questions (your teacher or tutor will probably be happy to mark them or comment on them for you).
• Working out what topics might come up in the exam, based in previous years’ papers, and preparing practice answers for those topics.
• If you’re preparing for language examinations, you might want to prepare for your oral exams out loud by speaking your answers, particularly if you’re an auditory learner. If you’re going to have a five-minute conversation, for example, make sure that you have enough to say on each possible topic to last the five minutes.
• Again if you’re an auditory learner, arrange some discussion groups on particular topics that you think might come up and debate them with friends.
• Case-based learning can also be a useful way to check whether you’ve understood the principles and are applying them sensibly in practice, which will appeal to pragmatists. You might want to ask a tutor or teacher to help provide suitable cases, or mark some answers. This will enable you to use practical examples in an exam, which will help with your general comfort level.

Revision for Reflectors

Reflectors like to read, and think, and read some more. They like to reflect on their experiences and fit things together. More than any other type of learner, a reflector staring out of the window may still be working!

If you are a 'Reflector Learner', revision activities that may suit you are such things as:

• Reading over notes and textbooks, and thinking about the content.
• Writing practice essays or exam questions, but only on subjects on which you’ve already done some reading.
• Summarising your notes and thoughts into a page, perhaps as a mind-map or similar picture to show yourself that you have consolidated your learning. Again, our page on Creative Thinking gives more information about this.
• Talking over the consolidated learning may be helpful, especially for auditory and kinaesthetic learners, but a one-to-one discussion with a tutor or teacher is likely to be more helpful than a group discussion for a reflector since more time will be available to think and respond to new ideas.

Revision for Theorists

Theorists like to go back to first principles and really understand the theoretical framework into which their work fits.

If you are a 'Theorist Learner', revision activities that may suit you are such things as:

• Additional research around a subject to explore theoretical background and set your work in better context. Although this sounds like making work, it will make you, as a theorist, feel more comfortable that you understand the subject and can work out the answers from first principles if necessary.
• Creating structured notes that fit everything together logically, which may help you to build the connections in your mind. Mind-mapping may be a helpful technique for this.
• Building your own models, or applying known models to case studies as practice for exams.
• Discussion groups may be a helpful way to work through the application of theories with like-minded colleagues. Asking a tutor to facilitate will ensure a more practical and less wholly theoretical focus!

Beware of 'Comfort Zone' Learning

It is easy to fall into a trap of thinking that you can only learn in your preferred learning style.

Learning styles, however, are not fixed or absolute, and we should not think of them as limiting what we can do. Most of us will change our learning style in response to different job or course requirements, although we may always retain a preference for one particular style.

Learning also happens in a cycle: we need to try things out, explore ideas, and work out how they fit with existing knowledge, before we can fully put them into practice. Limiting yourself to one particular style means that you may inadvertently miss part of that cycle, and make your learning less effective.

Remember that variety is the spice of life, and look out for new ways of learning to broaden your experience.

Revising Different Subjects Effectively

Some subjects lend themselves much more to certain revision styles. For example, nobody has yet come up with an effective substitute for practising mathematics problems, or reading your English Literature set texts carefully.

There are, however, always ways to tailor your learning, such as getting a group of friends together to act out your English Literature play and discuss its meaning, or recite your poems to each other to learn them for useful quotation later.

Experimenting with lots of different options will both keep you interested, and also help you find the method(s) that work best for you for different subjects.

Continue to:
Revision Skills
Avoiding Common Exam Mistakes

See also:
Planning an Essay | Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Effective Note-Taking | Time Management

Guest posts:
Revision Techniques for Auditory Learners
How to Systemize Your Study