How To Consolidate Everything You’ve Studied This Year

As you'll probably know, we’re big fans of writing study notes. The physical act of writing stuff down is – in our opinion – the best way to retain information.We also believe that reading over these notes is a really important part of consolidating what's been studied.

But there’s something extra your child can do to increase their retention of information by a further 50%

Once your child has finished studying everything they need to for a particular subject (hopefully this will be at least a day or two before the actual exam), we recommend that they condense all of the main points of that subject onto a single piece of A4 paper.Each point should be written out very simply, in note-taking form if possible.The simpler the better.As long as what’s written makes sense to your child. We want them to study off this piece of paper as much as they can during the last couple of days before the exam.It’s important that the points aren’t written out in full, because 1) it won’t all fit on one piece of A4 for starters, and 2) having only a few words written down forces your child to recall the majority of the concept/idea/quote/process by memory.In the couple of days just before each exam your child should be able to talk about each of their subjects fairly easily, and only need a few words to jog their memory. This is great practice for the exam, because obviously they won’t be able to take their notes in with them!It might also be a nice idea for you to quiz your child using this piece of paper. Talking stuff over with someone else, especially a parent, is a great to do some last-minute revision.