A guide for students · All year
How to revise so that it sticks
The two revision methods with the strongest evidence behind them are testing yourself (answering questions from memory rather than reading the answer) and spacing that testing out over weeks rather than cramming it into one evening. Rereading notes and highlighting feel productive but, in the largest review of the research, did much less.
Why does rereading feel like it works when it does not?
Reading your notes a second time makes them feel familiar, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowing something. The test is whether you can bring the idea back with the notes closed, which is what the exam will ask of you, and after an evening of rereading most people find they can recognise far more than they can recall.
A review of ten common study techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues, published in 2013, rated practice testing and distributed practice as the two of high use to students, and rated underlining, rereading and mnemonic devices as surprisingly low. Highlighting is not harmful, but it is mostly a way of choosing what to test yourself on later rather than a way of learning it.
What active recall looks like in practice
Active recall means making your memory do the work: closing the book and writing down everything you can about a topic, answering exam questions without looking anything up, or covering one side of a flashcard and saying the other. Getting something wrong and then checking the answer is part of how it works, so a session where you get half of it wrong is usually a better session than one spent rereading.
Exam questions are the best version of this for GCSEs and A levels, because they test the knowledge in the form it will be asked. Every board’s past papers are linked by course, and for the gaps between them you can practise from shared question decks or make your own questions from your notes.
Why spacing it out matters
Memory fades, and it fades more slowly each time something is brought back just as it was starting to go. So an hour spent on a topic across four short sessions a few days apart is worth more than the same hour in one go, even though the single session feels more thorough at the time.
A large analysis of spacing experiments by Cepeda and colleagues found that the best gap between sessions grows with how long you need to remember something, which for exams months away means coming back to a topic over weeks rather than days. Spaced repetition is the name for doing this on a schedule, and flashcard apps and cookie both work this way.
A week of revision built on both
Most weeks can follow the same shape: learn or relearn a small amount of new material early in the week, spend most sessions answering questions on topics from earlier weeks, and finish with one timed past paper or a long question marked against its mark scheme. Mark it honestly, and put every question you lost marks on into the next week’s list, so the things you find hard come round more often than the things you already know.
Short sessions with a break in between work better for most people than one long one, and switching between two or three subjects in a day keeps each of them spaced without any extra planning. A revision timetable worked backwards from your exam dates makes this easier to keep to.
Where to check
- Dunlosky and others (2013), Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques
- Cepeda and others (2006), Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks
Checked against these on . The rules change from year to year, so the pages above are the ones to trust if anything here disagrees with them.
Common questions
What is the best way to revise for GCSEs?
Test yourself rather than rereading, and spread it out. Answer exam questions and past papers from memory, mark them with the mark scheme, and come back to the topics you got wrong a few days later and again a few weeks later.
Is highlighting a waste of time?
Not a waste, but not much of a revision method on its own. It helps you pick out what to learn; the learning happens when you close the book and try to recall it.
How long should a revision session be?
Long enough to answer a set of questions and check them properly, which for most people is somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, followed by a real break. Several shorter sessions across a week usually beat one long one.
Should I make notes or do questions?
Notes are useful the first time you learn a topic. After that, questions do more, because they make you recall the material and show you what you have not yet got.
When should I start revising for exams in the summer?
Spacing works best over weeks, so a little from the autumn or winter of Year 11 or Year 13 does more than a lot from Easter. Starting late is still worth doing; it just leaves less room to space the topics out.