Students preparing to sit and write exams can rely on riveting revision tips. As a peripatetic speaker in several schools across the country, my pen can point-out the following techniques: reading of notes, summary-making, text-marking or highlighting, text annotations or addenda, response to end-of-topic questions, turning notes into questions or self-testing techniques, prognostication of topic-based exam questions, and revision of past exam papers.
The analogy of making a beaten path through the forest can assist us to get the concept right. Imagine you are passing through a thick thicket. On the first day, the path is full of wild bushes, which makes it difficult to penetrate it. But instead of giving up, you start clearing the bushes so as to make it easy to go through. Initially, it takes a lot of hard work to go through the labyrinthine path. The next day, when you decide to follow the same route, it becomes a bit easier as you push back most of the branches. Indeed, gradually, day by day, a clear path emerges.
I equate it to learning. More so, reading and revising, which abut on repetition. In the distant past the Athenian thinker called Aristotle observed, “We become what we repeatedly do; excellence is not an act but a habit.” Ideally, repetition gradually strengthens a student’s memory pathways. The more times you travel the same route, the stronger the memory becomes. If you only experience something once, and you fail to think about it again, you will certainly forget about it.
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No wonder, a certain sage said: repetition is the mother of all memories. Largely, information that students absorb through major senses can be forgotten quickly. Therefore, there is a mechanism that must be activated in case the memory is to go into a long-term store. A 19th Century German Psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus arrived on this intriguing discovery: forgetting follows an exponential slope. In other words, the sharpest drop in our memory of something occurs nearest to the time we experience it, but then the drop off evens out. Meaning, the first hours and days are the most important moments for reviewing new information any student yearns to remember in the long term. The younger a memory, the more vulnerable and weak it will be.
In relation to revision and repetition, there is the Recency Effect and Von Restorff Effect. James L. Adams writes about the effects in his heroic book titled The Care and Feeding of Ideas. The opposite of Recency Effect is the Primal Effect. Recency Effect is a cognitive bias where people tend to remember the most recently presented information or events better than those presented earlier in a sequence.
Von Restorff Effect also called Isolation Effect or Bizarreness Effect is the proven psychological theory stating that the more something stands out from the crowd, the more likely it is to be seen. Moreover, nearest and dearest reader, I want you to imagine of each memory as a sick new-born kitten. In case you can nurse it through its first 24 hours, then its chances of survival doubles. In case you can nurse it through its first week, its chances double again, and after that it will only require attention now in order to survive.
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Therefore, in case you think that once you are thorough with the concept, you can revise it only at the time of exam, you are highly mistaken. In case you are revising something regularly, you only need 5 minutes to refresh your memory after a month to recall the details, whereas in case you do not revise the topic, you will be completely blank when you will refer to it after a month. Finally, some students may strive to argue that revising a topic or chapter so many times is very time-consuming and humdrum.
This may be because they read all chapters or answers again and again from the book itself, whereas reading the whole chapter is required only in the beginning to understand. After that, in case the student prepares notes by focusing on keywords or important points from the subject matter, revising the content becomes very easy. Besides this, revision takes only 10% of the first learning time, if done within 24 hours. For instance, in case you memorise something in 60 minutes, you will take around 5-6 minutes to revise the same. Though exams bring with them a lot of stress, knowing that you have revised everything as planned entices relief and self-confidence.
By Victor Ochieng’
The writer rolls out academic talks in schools. vochieng.90@gmail.com. 0704420232
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