Revision Techniques That Don't Work | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to my series on studying effectively for gcse's nail levels before jumping into some studying techniques that work effectively we will be discussing some less effective studying techniques much of this information will be based on the research paper titled improving students learning with effective learning techniques promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology this is a review paper meaning what the authors have done is that they've gone out and read hundreds of other papers of various studies and experiments done in the field of educational psychology and pull together the key findings and compile them into this paper so the authors go through 10 commonly used learning techniques and rate them across a various criteria then group these learning techniques into low medium and high utility now in this series we will be focusing on the medium and high utility activities but in this video i will be mentioning the commonly used low utility activities and will refer to these as passive learning techniques which means they don't require much mental effort to use and whilst passive learning techniques may sound great after all who doesn't want their vision to be as effortfully as possible we will learn that during this series the harder our brain has to work to retrieve something from memory the better we learn it and the longer it will stick do bear in mind that i'm not saying that people haven't achieved good results using these ineffective learning techniques there are many people who have but what i'm saying is that there are better learning techniques you can use to achieve the same results if not better in about a fifth amount of time as always timestamps will be in the description down below so let's get straight to you now by far the most commonly used

revision technique is rereading whether it be our class notes or revision guide this technique is something that many of us naturally default to when growing up because we aren't really told what else to do the idea that people tend to have is that if you reread something enough times then it will eventually become burnt into your memory but this isn't entirely true now i'm not saying that rereading and many of these techniques have no benefits it's just that there are better revision techniques out there that are which are far more beneficial and can give you high marks in the same amount of time as for rereading you soon begin to hit a point where you see no progress being made take this study from 1960 as an example where university students were asked to read a 1 500 word text about the making of lover or a 750 word text about australian history zero one two or four times each re-reading was done immediately after the previous re-reading and after a 10-minute delay they were asked to take a test where they had to fill in the gaps as expected students who did not read the text at all the worst around 17 percent correct those who read it once did better at 32 percent correct and those who read it twice did even better at 43 percent but then those who read it four times did only slightly better at 45 correct now what does this mean for us it means that whilst the rereading can be effective doing it over and over again in a short time period like just before an exam we soon begin to hit a point with at which rereading does little to improve our score yet the irony is that before tests students who re-read over and over are the most confident in their abilities to score a good mark only to then not do so well that's because they soon began to hit the limit of the benefits they could derive from rereading which says 45 percent of the box which obviously depends on the subject but you get the idea that rereading more times won't necessarily help you to push that score even higher you'll soon begin to hit a limit re-reading also gives us the illusion that we know and understand the material but the reality is that we still have trouble of recalling the material it's far too easy to make it to mistake rereading for being effective because we recognize the words and the material that we will learnt in class but there's an important distinction between recognizing something and then being able to recall in an exam now the conclusion that the researchers came to after reading dozens of studies on rereading is that finally although rereading is relatively economical with respect to time demands and training requirements when compared to some other learning techniques rereading is typically much less effective the relative disadvantage of re-reading to other techniques is the largest strike against re-reading and is the factor that we did most heavily in our decision to assign it a low utility which basically means that re-reading is okay when you're short some time and no one has to really teach you how to do it but rereading is far inferior to other learning techniques and ultimately the researchers gave it a low utility rating in the research review now just like

rereading cramming is another go-to strategy which isn't as effective as other techniques which we will learn about later in the series i'm not going into as much detail of the evidence why cramming doesn't work because we all know it doesn't you probably have experienced it yourself when cramming for an exam um only to get a mediocre score and to get everything a few days later because that's happened a few times to me too yet despite cramming not working we see so many people do it in school and in adult life even many teachers trainers and coaches believe that the most effective way to get good at something is to practice it over and over again until you have it down but research actually shows opposite that spacing out practice from let's say one day to seven days goes a long way in both understanding and long-term retention and it doesn't just go for studying sitting down and focusing on any task for extended period of time whether it be practicing a sporting technique or a musical instrument or anything else is nowhere near as good as uh and effective as spacing out that practice over a longer interval ultimately while cramming is better than not studying at all it mostly just gives us a warm feeling that we've mastered the material because we've been looping for over and over again in our short term memory what we gain from cramming is very temporary and our sense of understanding is only an illusion as we will soon see it's only for your long term effortful learning techniques such as active recall and space repetition that allows us to process um understand and reconsolidate information in the best manner next up is

highlighting which is another commonly used technique now while it is useful in say an english exam when you have to pick out interesting points in a text which you then have to analyze and write about research has shown it's ineffective as a learning technique for instance take this study from 19 c4 in which university students were registered around 8 000 words of articles they were split up into one of three groups a control one which only reads the article and another which is free to highlight as much as they want to the students were given an hour to study the text and were told to return to lab a week later the students were then given 10 minutes to review their text with the highlighting on for the highlighting group and were then given a 54 item multiple choice test the research has found that the students who use highlighting did no better than other groups and it isn't just a study many of studies have shown the same thing now that doesn't mean say highlighting has no benefits in another study they found that students who were asked questions relevant to what they highlighted performed better on those questions and students who did not highlight all but they also lost a few marks and questions on the information they didn't highlight ultimately the common problem that we face is that we tend to over highlight and this reduces how much the highlighted information stands out from the rest of information because in an extreme case if you end up highlighting everything then you may as well have highlighted nothing once again the researchers said that highlighting was a very low utility and for most students highlighting does very little to improve the exam performance

performance now next up is summarization this is something commonly used by students in which they you read through a page of a textbook then summarize what they learned on a separate piece of paper but let's look at what the evidence says about this so in 1978 a study was done in which secondary school students were assigned into groups and were given 30 minutes to study a text students in the summarization group were told to write three lines that summarized the main points from the text there was another note-taking group which could write three lines for each page of the text rather than for the whole text and the final group was a control group who just read the text without doing anything else students were then tested straight away or a week later on 25 questions it was found that students in the summarization group on average did not do significantly better than those who were told to just take notes ultimately those conducting the research reviewed placed summarization in the middle when compared to other learning techniques in the study but said it was still less powerful than other techniques such as active recall and space repetition they rated summarization to be of a low utility and said that whilst it's an effective strategy for those who are skilled at some rising most students would require a lot of training in showing them how to summarize effectively which makes the strategy less doable for most students now you may have also

heard about the popular idea that you fit into one of several types of learners whether it be visual auditory read write or kinesthetic learners and that if you can find information presented in a way that matches your preferred learning style then you will be more successful but whether we like or not this is an idea that is not supported by any empirical evidence for example in a 2008 study the researchers performed a research review of the existing papers on learning styles and found very little credible evidence from well-designed experiments about the existence of learning styles they argue that given the lack of evidence for learning styles any use of tests or tools designed for one particular link style are just a waste of time and resources research shows that when the learning style matches the nature of the content whether it be geometry as visual or poetry as verbal then students perform better regardless of what they believe their preferred learning style to be now this makes sense if you think about it if you were learning about geometry then obviously you would want a visual approach you wouldn't want someone to explain geometry and audio form to you because you're so called auditory learner anyways that's it for this video

and i'll see you in the next video in the series