Exam Countdown

S is for Success, S is also for…

START!

It may sound glaringly obvious but if you haven’t started revising … then there is NO TIME like the present! It is never too late. If you don’t know where to start go back to basics. Start with the content of each examinable subject. Ask yourself: What is it I need to know? Your teachers may have already provided you with a form of syllabus. If not, obtain one for each subject. The syllabus will help you frame the content of each subject. What are the units, topics and sub-topics? What is the specific content within the sub-topics that I need to know?

It may help to map this content. This will give you an overview of the subject and allow you to see where topics fit in and with each other. Syllabus snapshots are available as free downloads on our website: www. amazingbrains.co.uk/syllabus-snapshots

Your next step is to gather together all the class notes, textbooks and materials you need for each subject. If you’re missing something then speak to your teacher about accessing that material. Next, organise your notes into different coloured files. Divide up units and topics using file dividers.

Organising and structuring your notes in this way should help you feel a sense of control.

When preparing your study planner make sure you allow time to cover all content. Check your planner tasks against your syllabus and teacher revision lists.  Then, get cracking – choose your first subject, unit and topic and begin the process of condensing material into bite-sized, memorable notes.

S is for STRIVE

Commit to the process and challenge yourself to be your personal best over the next 8 weeks. A little bit of pressure can be good for performance but too much can spill over and cause stress. Be careful. Set yourself some realistic target grades. These don’t have to be school predicted grades – they can be your own personal targets!! Are you sitting on a ‘C’ for a subject but know that with extra work and focus you could get to a ‘B’? If so set yourself a B grade target for that subject. Be realistic. If you achieved a D grade in one of your mocks three weeks ago, and are just beginning to revise now, then it is unlikely that you will achieve a Grade A. However, you may be able to jump up a grade or maybe even two!

S is for SPACE

By space we mean both physical space – the place you study and psychological space – giving yourself permission to take some downtime.

Physical Space

The ‘place’ you revise is crucial to your ability to concentrate, be relaxed and engaged in the individual sense-making activity that is studying.

That space may involve a desk and chair, a study wall, a bean bag – only you will know what works best. The important thing is that it is a relatively quiet space (particularly if you are engaging in revision of complex concepts) and it has no distractions.

With the best will in the world, it is near impossible to ignore phone notifications that are ‘pinging’ in the background as you work. For a start you are likely to think “I’d better check, in case it is something important, or in case I am missing out on something!!’ If you want to maximise productivity, then remove the phone from the study space. This requires discipline – but it will be worth it!

A common question we are asked by students is – “should I be listening to music when studying?” There is much contradictory research on this topic. Our advice is this. If you tend to listen to music then test whether or not it is of actual benefit to you as an individual. Try studying with and without the music and, then at a later stage of your revision session, test yourself by recalling what you have learnt. Be honest about the results!

Last thing – if you enjoy studying in your bedroom (and you are being productive) then by all means continue to do so. However, think also about other options for a study space – another room in the house, the local library or school (many schools offer after school study). Your bedroom can then become your sanctuary – somewhere for headspace.

Psychological Space

Speaking of headspace – give yourself permission to breathe and relax. Your body and mind will reward you for it in the long term: provided of course that you aren’t spending 90% of your time relaxing and 10% studying!! Maintaining a balance of work, rest, sleep and exercise is crucial to exam success.

S is for STRATEGY

Stick to the evidence in terms of study strategies.

·      Space out your revision and work in small manageable chunks (30-45 mins at a time).

·      Test yourself as you go and revisit material on 4 or 5 occasions (time permitting).

·      Try to retrieve from memory (on a blank sheet) the material you have been revising.

·      Generate questions from your revision notes and ask a family member to question you.

·      Teach friends or peers what you are learning.

·      Interleave topics – mix them up for more effortful learning.

·      Dual code your revision notes by using words and graphics.

Remember re-reading is only effective if it is used in conjunction with retrieval practice. Re-reading can give us a false sense of security. We recognise the information and so think we know it. This is fine if you are sitting a series of multiple choice tests! However, the acid test of whether or not we really know something is being able to recall it from memory without the aid of notes or textbooks.

S is for SUPPORT

Exam time can be stressful for some students so it’s really important to try to keep a sense of perspective. You can only do your best and no one expects more than that. You may feel lonely at times but remember you are never alone. There are teachers, friends and family members there to support you. Don’t be afraid to share your concerns.

Whatever happens on results day – it’s not the end of the world, it is just one moment in time, one part of your education journey! GOOD LUCK!

 

Roisin McFeely is Founder and Director of Amazing Brains, a Social Enterprise that works with 50,000 young people every year to help them develop the mindset and study skills to succeed in exams. She holds an M.Ed with Distinction from QUB and her research on Examining Students’ Views Of Intelligence And The Link To Motivation To Learn was shortlisted for a British Educational Research Association award. She is also a former international athlete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Study Strategy: Dual Coding

When you think back to your own learning and studying patterns in school, what jumps to mind? Is it the lengthy paragraphs in your subject textbook or is it your own handwritten notes, images and visual cues? Maybe it’s the teacher talking, telling a story, and engaging your emotions or perhaps more a mix of some or all of the above formats.

When we were at school much less thought was put into the impact of multiple delivery formats on student engagement and motivation, and perhaps even less time was targeted at what the evidence said about what helps make information ‘stick’.

The Science Bit

According to the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, the Dual Coding theory of cognition was proposed first by Allan Paivio in 1971 in order to explain the significant effects of imagery on recall.

The core concept of Dual coding is quite simple – the “human mind operates with two distinct classes of mental representation (or “codes”), verbal representations and mental images, and … human memory thus comprises two functionally independent (although interacting) systems or stores, verbal memory and image memory.” Imagery aids the recall of verbal material because when a word evokes a related image (either spontaneously, or through deliberate effort), two separate but linked memory traces are laid down, one in each of the two memory stores. The chances of retention and retrieval are much greater when stored in two (rather than one) distinct functional locations.

The Practical Application

Put simply, Dual Coding is the process of combining visual and verbal material. By using both formats your memory has a much better chance of retaining information. Why? Because information is processed through two separate but linked channels.

Most of us have undoubtedly used ‘dual coding’ when we were studying but didn’t necessarily have the scientific name for it. More than likely we did so based on an intuitive hunch of what might work! What’s exciting in the present day (and particularly so for students) is that there is now concrete evidence from cognitive psychology that, if used correctly, the technique is highly effective for studying.

In practical terms, students might decide to use a range of visual formats for the purpose of studying e.g. sketchnotes, mind maps, infographics, diagrams, photos or even videos. The format might also vary depending on the subject. Diagrams, for example, might work best for biology or geography and sketchnotes for history.

A Picture Speaks 1,000 Words: Sketchnotes

Sketchnoting is becoming increasingly popular with students. Sketchnotes are essentially visual summaries of text that include both handwritten notes and drawings/images. If we really think about it, the whole point of notetaking is to capture ideas for future reference. Unsurprisingly then, combining graphics and words during note-taking will make the information more memorable. Added to this is emerging evidence that sketchnotes make notes more interesting and may help engage students more thoroughly with the material.

A short word of caution on dual coding however. Keep it simple, keep all images relevant (otherwise they become a distraction), study in small manageable chunks and avoid using too many formats for the one concept. You want to avoid cognitive overload (having too much information to process). Tune in to future blogs for more on cognitive overload and other learning concepts.

Roisin McFeely is Founder and Director of Amazing Brains, a Social Enterprise that works with 50,000 young people every year to help them develop the mindset and study skills to succeed in exams. She holds an M.Ed with Distinction from QUB and her research on Examining Students’ Views Of Intelligence And The Link To Motivation To Learn was shortlisted for a British Educational Research Association award. She is also a former international athlete.

Study Strategy: Deliberate Practice

Practice doesn’t always make perfect despite the popularity of this saying. However, deliberate practice (a term coined by Anders Ericsson) does lead to improvement and, ultimately, success.  According to Ericsson that means practicing activities that lead to maximizing improvement through development towards expert performance. This sounds complex and a little highbrow. Put more simply, it means the identification of strategies that work and practicing these in an efficient and effective way.

If you have read our first two blogs on mindset and neuroplasticity then you will appreciate the importance of understanding the amazing capacity of the human brain. More importantly, you will know that any innate talents (perceived or otherwise) are simply the starting point – not only can we learn new things, but we can become smarter. In fact, with the right guidance, support and coaching (or teaching), we can achieve more than is often thought possible.

Application to School

Does your child work really hard, put the effort in and yet doesn’t seem to ‘get anywhere’? Is s/he re-reading notes, highlighting information, spending hours studying and not making progress? If this is your child, s/he should be congratulated firstly, for having the motivation and determination to study. But, secondly, it is worth exploring with them why the hard work isn’t paying off. With study in particular there isn’t always a correlation between the quantity (number of hours) devoted to it and the quality of the end result. Deliberate practice plays a central role in a quality outcome.

Applied to schooling, deliberate practice involves the act of studying in a very strategic way, using evidence of what works. It is well-defined, specific, goal-directed and consists of repeated stretch and challenge. On this journey, progress is the goal. Deliberate practice therefore involves critical learning opportunities, especially in times of ‘failure’ or under-performance. In our culture, failure is typically associated with negative feelings, including shame and embarrassment. Elsewhere, in East Asia for instance, failure is embraced as a positive opportunity to learn.

What might deliberate practice actually look like for your child’s study patterns?

1. It will involve a maximum 45-minute study session at any one time, followed by a 10-minute break and 5-minute review.
2. It will involve interleaving, that is, changing the order in which topics are studied to guarantee more effortful learning. Homework practices would also benefit from this mixed ordering.
3. It will involve the organization of study sessions that guide your child to recall knowledge and demonstrate his/her understanding, without the aid of study/text/notes.
4. It will involve a spaced revision schedule, that is, the revision of new material on up to four occasions in order to create and strengthen new neural pathways, and then commit this to longer-term memory.

As a parent, you can be directly involved in these deliberate practices. Quiz your child about what they are learning. Quizzes can be fun! Challenge them to answer a past paper question. Encourage them to take a blank sheet of paper and to retrieve from memory, without the aid of study notes, something they have learned in class or have revised that day.

Studying should always involve specific goals rather than working towards a broad and general outcome. Not only will smaller more manageable chunks help with setting goals but this also helps your child to move from basic to more sophisticated goals.

Tune in to future blogs to hear more about our Ultimate Study System (built on evidence of what works, including deliberate practice), about the differences between recognition and recall, and how to design study sessions to maximize your child’s learning. Until next time …

Roisin McFeely is Founder and Director of Amazing Brains, a Social Enterprise that works with 50,000 young people every year to help them develop the mindset and study skills to succeed in exams. She holds an M.Ed with Distinction from QUB and her research on Examining Students’ Views Of Intelligence And The Link To Motivation To Learn was shortlisted for a British Educational Research Association award. She is also a former international athlete. 

 

You can rewire your brain…because it’s plastic!!

In our work with students (and parents) the most common question we are asked is… “Can you teach me HOW to study?” The answer is of course YES but we also explain that a pre-requisite to being able to apply effective study techniques is a background knowledge and basic understanding of the important piece of machinery doing the work – the human brain!!

Fortunately we now know more than ever about the brain. In fact brain science has progressed at an astonishing rate over the past decade in particular. Not that long ago neuroscientists believed the brain did not change after childhood, that it was hard-wired, that the structure was fixed and incapable of any level of malleability.

More recently, study after study has shown the opposite is actually true, in fact our brain has an incredible capacity to  be dynamic, to grow and to change throughout our lives. This finding, known as brain plasticity (or neuroplasticity) has been heralded as the most significant neuroscientific breakthrough in over 400 years.

What happens in the brain when we learn?

Our brains have over 80 billion neurons (brain cells) that are all connected together. When we learn something electrical currents fire up in our brain, pass across synapses, between neurons and to different areas of the brain. The more we practice the faster the currents travel along their particular pathways, the deeper the connections and therefore the learning. That is exactly why practice (deliberate and directed) or in this case ‘study’ is so important for long-term retention. When we try new learning tasks our brains carve out new pathways and again these strengthen with practice. Our brains are therefore continuously changing in both structure and function.

Brain plasticity in action…
Researchers from University College London scanned the brains of 79 trainee London black taxi drivers prior to commencement of their rigorous ‘London Knowledge’ learning programme. As part of the process potential taxi drivers have to learn 25,000 street names and 100,000 landmarks and then complete a gruelling six stages
of examinations.

What the researchers found was fascinating… Throughout the process, changes to the trainees’ brains were mapped by regular MRI scans. Compared with similar scans from non-taxi drivers, those who had attempted the Knowledge had increased the size of the posterior hippocampus – the rear section of the hippocampus which is responsible for memory formation and spatial navigation.

The Professor who led the research, Prof Eleanor Maguire, said: “By following the trainee taxi drivers over time as they acquired – or failed to acquire – the Knowledge, a uniquely challenging spatial memory task, we have seen directly and within individuals how the structure of the hippocampus can change with external stimulation.” This is unquestionable proof of the potential of the human brain to change.

This research is very exciting not only for scientists but for educators and parents too. It certainly confirms what we have always thought in Amazing Brains…Your brain has an astonishing capacity and if you use it in an efficient way you can achieve well beyond what you thought was possible!!

Next step… decide on your task or skill, get to work through (deliberate, repeated and directed attention) and witness how your amazing brain can rewire itself.

Roisin McFeely is Founder and Director of Amazing Brains, a Social Enterprise that works with 50,000 young people every year to help them develop the mindset and study skills to succeed in exams. She holds an M.Ed with Distinction from QUB and her research on Examining Students’ Views Of Intelligence And The Link To Motivation To Learn was shortlisted for a British Educational Research Association award. She is also a former international athlete.

Does Mindset Matter in Learning?

Stop for a minute and think back to when you were in school … Even if it doesn’t bring back happy memories stay with me! You’re 14, it’s Sunday night and you’re thinking about the week ahead.

Were there any classes that you dreaded? Maybe there was a subject you weren’t that interested in. Perhaps you didn’t get on with the teacher or maybe you thought you just weren’t smart enough to be able to cope with the subject content?

If you thought you weren’t smart enough, think back to how that affected your motivation to learn the subject? Did you feel demotivated? Every time you walked into that particular classroom, what was your mindset?

“A mindset is a set of attitudes or way of thinking that determines how we behave.”

Fast-forward years later … It is now your child sitting at home on a Sunday night preparing for a busy week in school. How are they feeling about classes? Do they dread any subjects and, more importantly, why? What will their mindset be in school this week?

We all bring a mindset to learning challenges – a fundamental belief about how we learn, of our capacity, intelligence and of our limits. This mindset is crucial because it leads to different learning behaviours that in turn create a range of learning outcomes.

All too often in schools I hear students (and parents) say things like “I’m just not good at Maths, French, Music, Art etc., I’ve never been any good and that is just the way I am.” Some go so far as to say: “I was born that way and there is nothing I can do to change it.”

This fixed way of thinking about ability is highly damaging to learning and ultimately to success. It also happens to be a self-perpetuating myth. We might not be good at a particular subject YET but that doesn’t mean we cannot improve to become ‘good’ at it. You don’t have to take my word for it. Fortunately, there is now a growing body of international research from social psychology and neuroscience that refutes the idea of fixed abilities.

Allow me to introduce you to Carol Dweck, a Stanford Professor of Social Psychology. According to Professor Dweck, most people hold one of two mindsets about their ability, or a mixture of both. A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence and ability are static, genetic traits that we simply can’t change in any significant way. Success is therefore the proclamation of that inherent intelligence and avoiding challenge or failure at all costs becomes a way of maintaining the sense of ‘being clever’.

Students that hold this view might say things like: “I don’t have to work that hard, I’m already smart,” “If I fail I must be no good at it, so then what’s the point.” However a “growth mindset” embraces challenge and sees failure not as evidence of  being deficient in intelligence or lacking in ability, but as a springboard for learning, growth and for stretching our current abilities.

Out of these two mindsets which, due to environmental conditions, we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behaviour and in particular our relationship with success, failure and challenge. Dweck has worked with thousands of students over a forty-year period and her research consistently shows the impact of these deeply held ability views on learning.

Dweck’s work has been instrumental in stimulating educators and parents to reflect on certain practices – such as labelling students as having fixed abilities in particular subjects. Her work on how to effectively use praise has prompted often well-meaning teachers to think about how their language can  perpetuate fixed views about ability. Most importantly, her research puts ‘effort’ and not ‘ability’ at the heart of discussions around learning and success.

This is what Professor Dweck’s research shows:

In her studies, students who had a fixed view of their ability/intelligence displayed self-defeating behaviours in the face of learning challenges. They believed that intelligence is innate and that it determined their performance on a task, much more than effort or persistence. Dweck found that these students lost confidence more quickly, avoided challenge, gave up relatively easily and blamed their lack of success on their lack of innate intelligence.

The more resilient, persistent students had a ‘growth mindset’. They believed that ability could be improved through effort, hard work and trying new strategies. They saw challenge and obstacles as part of the process of learning and persevered with the task for much longer. Failure was for them an opportunity to learn, grow and develop.

Ultimately, Dweck found that it was indeed possible to change students’ views about their ability and their capacity to learn. Where this was evidenced, students experienced an increase in success and achievement.

For more on Professor Dweck’s work, check out ‘Mindset’ – The New Psychology of Success.

Finally, a word of caution … some people often misunderstand growth mindset. It is not simply about believing you can do anything. Yes, the belief that you can grow your intelligence, and understanding that your brain has the capacity to do so, is crucial but growth mindset approaches also involve…

identifying areas for improvement, adopting specific, carefully selected strategies to meet individual needs and deliberately practicing in an effortful way.

We will be addressing all of these elements in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Roisin McFeely is Founder and Director of Amazing Brains, a Social Enterprise that works with 50,000 young people every year to help them develop the mindset and study skills to succeed in exams. She holds an M.Ed with Distinction from QUB and her research on Examining Students’ Views Of Intelligence And The Link To Motivation To Learn was shortlisted for a British Educational Research Association award. She is also a former international athlete.