Adam Boxer, one of the authors of the new Oxford Revise: Revision and Practice series, explains how its Knowledge, Retrieval, Practice model leads to truly effective revision. If you’re anything like me, one of the questions you’ll be asked the most by students is how they should revise. Most students and parents don’t really know […]
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I met Professor Bruce Hood at the Independent Schools Association conference more than a year ago, where he spoke about the prevailing mythology surrounding the neuroscience of learning. His desire to debunk those myths was matched by his enthusiasm for getting university researchers into schools to share latest research findings in all areas of learning. He has established […]
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In a previous blog post I outlined a very basic memory technique which works by creating a story out of to-be-remembered information. This makes the information more memorable than recalling a list of unrelated words and the technique itself requires no real groundwork, after all, you are just making up a story. Whilst impressive results […]
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I am able to commit a huge amount of information to memory in a very short space of time. I can memorise the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 2 minutes, a list of 240 random words within a 15-minute time limit and, given an hour, I can memorise the […]
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I am able to commit a huge amount of information to memory in a very short space of time. I can memorise the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 2 minutes, a list of 240 random words within a 15-minute time limit and, given an hour, I can memorise the […]
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Isn’t it amazing how quickly and easily adolescents can learn the words of a song, and yet they struggle to remember mathematical formulae? Memory in mathematics is quite peculiar. In common with learning the words of a song, once you get started, it can be surprising how much comes back, but, as with songs, it […]
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New challenges are coming thick and fast for all of us: getting to grips with new assessment objectives, exam formats and marking systems as well as whole new topics to teach. For those of us planning schemes of work, the linear course gives a welcome flexibility, but this lack of a fixed half-time marker can […]
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Continuing my work tutoring A level students, I have been writing some one page, A4 summaries of Mechanics 1 for the Edexcel M1 component. I have got the full course down to five pages. These are not meant to be a complete, perfect summary of the course, simply an idea to prompt the memory and […]
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Sometimes students need to take notes. There is no getting away from this if we want them to have something they can look back at, for example, for revision. For some students, and indeed some teachers, this can be excruciatingly boring. There are ways of making this more exciting for everyone. One way is to […]
Read moreIn my experience the most effective way of helping students understand the experimental method is through carrying out an experiment with the class. The Teacher’s Companion (handouts 137 and 138) contains resources to conduct a class memory experiment or you could run a simple Stroop test as explained below. The following activities could be used […]
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