Picture the scene. It is the mid 1990s. Oasis are on tour and there is conflict in Eastern Europe. In a classroom, students are packing away when the teacher calls out: “Don’t forget, we have a test next week. Make sure you take your books with you and revise for it.”
Cue groans from the class, who start shoving their exercise books into their bags as they push out of the door. One student hangs back.
“Sir…” he begins. “How should I revise?”
The teacher looks momentarily confused. “You have your book, don’t you? Just go through what you have learned. Try to remember it for the test.”
Reader, that student was me. And I am not sure how much the world has moved on since those halcyon days.
Learning how to revise
From what I remember, I was never taught how to revise. Not at school, college or at university. I wasn’t taught about revision, or how people learn, while training to teach in the early 2000s. This feels like a huge oversight. There seemed to be an assumption that people would just know how to do it, as though revision is an innate ability.
I was well into my teaching career before I came across the work of people like John Dunlosky, with his , which helped me to understand that there are certain principles that make revision more or less effective, and that revision is something that we need to teach students to do.
More on exam revision:
But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon Logan Fiorella and Richard E Mayer’s work around that things really fell into place.
Their research looked at which activities, undertaken by students, are most likely to help them to learn what had been intended. They came up with eight potential strategies that teachers and their students used. These were summarising, mapping, drawing, imagining, self-testing, self-explaining, teaching and enacting.
Many of these strategies also make excellent revision techniques, once students know how to use them.
What makes generative learning especially helpful is that a common, simple process sits behind the seemingly different and more complicated strategies. This process helps to show how learning can take place.
1. Select information
First, students need to select information. Whether they are drawing a revision mind map, creating questions for self-testing or writing a summary of a topic, they need to think about what to include.
One of the most common issues I find when students come to revise is that everything seems important. They highlight entire pages in their books, reread all of their notes or transfer everything from the page into bullet points.
None of this involves very much thought and so it doesn’t lead to very much learning. Generative learning strategies all start with students having to think about what to include.
2. Organise information
The second part of the process is for students to organise this information into a new form. With mapping, this might involve thinking of different categories to put the information into. With drawing, it might be turning a prose description of a process into a diagram. With enacting it might mean turning a diagram into gestures.
Once again this means that students have to think hard about the information they are studying so that they can come up with a way to organise it. The eye can’t just scan over the page or the highlighter can’t just cover the page. Decisions need to be made.
3. Integrate information
Finally, students are asked to integrate the information with what they already know. It is very hard to remember isolated fragments of information. Our understanding about the world builds when we link knowledge together. Therefore, when generating learning we want students to reflect on how the thing they are currently studying connects to what else they know.
There is a lot of information and advice out there about the different generative learning strategies. For me, the most powerful part of it for teaching students how to revise is the principles that sit behind the strategies. If we teach students how to select, organise and integrate information then we have also taught them how to revise.
Mark Enser is a former head of department. He is a freelance writer and co-author of Generative Learning in Action
