Revision, revision, revision!

Now is the time when we seem to forget everything else we are doing and all things focus on year 11 and GCSE revision.

At the end of the day of course it is our students who actually need to do the revision, but we need to be mindful that many of them may still not really be clear on how to revise.

We also have the problem that much research shows that students are not good at recognising the most effective learning strategies, and the activities that they tend to favour are not necessarily those that give the best results (eg (1)  Adams et al, 2014). My first tip for maths revision therefore would be to explain this to your students - learning is hard, and if it feels easy it is probably because you are not learning as much!

Analogies are also useful to help students understand what they should be doing and why. Imagine if you were about to run a long distance race, say a half marathon. You would start your training well in advance of the race, you’d build up your distance and the number of runs you do each week, and by the time you reached race day you would be very comfortable running the 13.1 miles (21 km) required. You wouldn’t leave it all until the last minute, just trying on your new trainers the week before the race! It is the same with revision: little and often is the best way to go about it.

For maths I propose that there should be two main aspects to revision for maths GCSE.

1. Learning facts

There are things in maths that at this stage just need to be remembered: common equivalent fractions, decimals and percentages, definitions like “prime”, “factor” and “multiple”, the names of 2D and 3D shapes and the angle rules to name just a few.

Students should spend a little time each day quizzing themselves on all of these facts. There are numerous websites and apps available now to help students do this as well as specific practice books, and some revision guides also contain retrieval qDeb Friis, uestions. Making flash cards is a good idea, but I think it is important to pair down the information on each card - there are commercially available sets of cards which seem to have entire procedures on each one, I’m not sure these are really useful!

Students should be asking family and friends to test them, and using the Leitner system (2) with flashcards so that the intervals between review are increased. What is written on the flashcards will vary dramatically depending on the student, for some it may only be the names of the circle theorems and the more complex index laws, for others it might be much more basic vocabulary and number facts.

Do not include things they already know, this is a great way for students to waste time thinking they are doing something useful!

2. Practicing questions

In order to be able to do maths, students need to do maths! Encourage students to start by going through each topic in turn, making sure they know the basic facts, and then following this up with questions relating to this topic. Revision guides are a great way to do this as the contents page provides a ready-made checklist, but make sure the guide includes a reasonable amount of both short and long answer questions. It is important to mark them, and if any are wrong and the student cannot figure out why they should obviously ask for help.

Every so often students should do questions from a past exam paper – any paper will do as long as it is the correct tier. This will help students to get used to identifying which topics they need to use when the questions are all mixed up. It is useful to discuss with students the strategies they can try if they don’t know where to start. Encourage them to keep calm, and write down any maths they can think of that might be related to the question.

There are lots of resources that teachers can use in class to help with this - for example goal free questions or backwards faded papers. It may be useful for students to break a paper down into sections and start by aiming to get the first ten questions of each paper completely correct all the time. As they get more confident, move further through the papers.

All of this should of course start well in advance of the exam, and revision should be seen as an ongoing task with students aiming to be doing a little bit of maths each day for as long as possible before exams start. Imagine how much they will already know if they do this from the start of the GCSE course!

Encourage them to then timetable in two or three longer sessions each week for practicing questions as the exams get closer, and get them to do some past papers under exam conditions – that is without stopping to check the answers.

By breaking down revision for maths and for other subjects into manageable chunks students will give themselves the best possible chance of succeeding.

Deb Friis

Lead Practitioner for Maths, The Sir Robert Woodard Academy Assistant Maths Hub Lead, Sussex Maths Hub Evidence Lead in Education, Durrington Research School

(1)  Adams, D. M., McLaren, B. M., Durkin, K., Mayer, R. E., Rittle-Johnson, B., Isotani, S., & van Velsen, M. (2014). Using erroneous examples to improve mathematics learning with a web-based tutoring system. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 401-411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.03.053

(2)  Explanation of the Leitner System