At St Augustine’s Sixth Form, we aim to keep our revision strategies simple but effective. We want to maximise the impact to ensure that knowledge and skills are embedded in student’s long-term memories and can be recalled as students face their exams, coursework and other assignments.
Our advice centres on the following principles, which are shared with all teaching staff & practiced in form time with the sixth form tutor team:
- Revision or study should be active not passive.
- Retrieval practise or recall is one of the most effective ways to ensure information is stored in long-term memory.
- Spaced and interleaved practise to ensure students cover all subjects and topics.
- Dual-coding to condense or summarise information to support memory.
- Finding balance – Effective study is a marathon not a spring, students should ensure
Strategies we teach:
At St Augustine’s Sixth Form we embed these skills within our existing academic curriculum but also ensure they are more explicitly taught as part of our pastoral programme. We are also lucky enough to have a dedicated Academic Mentor to provide targeted support and coach students with study skills if they need that extra push. We also invite outside agencies to come and teach study skills to our students and have worked with highly effective agencies like ‘Elevate Education’ who had delivered very popular sessions that students how found ‘very helpful’ and ‘really engaging!’
We do also encourage our sixth form student leaders to act as mentors, which is something they do in conjunction with their teachers, running support and revision classes, study groups and supporting younger students from Year 10-12 with their learning, providing a taste of sixth form life, whilst also ensuring that, through the act of teaching, they themselves are actively learning their content for their final exams. All students involved find this an incredibly productive strategy, leading their peers whilst consolidating their own learning.
