It's revision time! Your favourite time, I know. Now, you're probably wondering -
seeing as you clicked on this video - how to revise for your history GCSE. And, not
to blow my own trumpet, (that is my own trumpet by the way I own it),
but I did get a grade 9 in my History GCSE, so I have some answers for you.
The first thing I want to say is a little note on how long you should be
revising for. Now, there is no set rule to this. As much as people want set rules,
there aren't rules; some people cope with longer periods.
I wouldn't say go for too long but there is a strategy that I think works, and
when I was able to discipline myself enough to stick with it - which admittedly
wasn't often - it worked really well. And this is the idea of doing 25 minutes of
revision and then having a 5 minute break, and then doing another 25 minutes
of revision, but of something completely different.
It could be the same subject: you could be doing flashcards and then you could
be writing notes but on different topic, or it could be a completely different
subject. On a normal school day in year 11, maybe four of these would be a good
idea. Obviously, as exams get nearer you, can
make this more. If you're in year, 10 then maybe you want to do less. I would have
done none at this point in year 10, and I still survived, so well done on being a
year 10 who's actually revised. So, anyway, four of these: that's my general
rule of thumb. Anyway, time aside I've broken down revising into what I think
is hopefully a fool-proof method, which I like to call, my "3 steps to revision
success". I hope that's cheesy enough for you. Step one is understanding the
content. Obviously, this is the most important step because if you don't
understand the content, what hope do you have of writing an entire exam paper
worth of answers on content you don't understand?
Exactly. You don't have any hope. Understanding
can be achieved in a few different ways, the first of which is luck. Sometimes,
you'll be sat in class and you just get it. Helps if you are lucky enough to have
a good teacher. Other times, however, luck isn't on your side and perhaps you need
to go back and reread through the textbook, and that will be enough to clear it
up in your head. Or maybe, you're going to have to speak to a friend or a teacher
to try and get your head around the content. For a further bit of clarity, you
can write notes. Lots of people view notes as a form of
memorisation, but they're not. Once the notes are written, they're written. Like, you can
read back through them, but reading back through them, you may as well just be
reading the textbook and not have written the notes in the first place.
Notes are a visual tool to help organise information so that you can understand
it better, which brings me to the second step:
memorisation. Remembering the content is quite crucial, as in an exam you won't
have the textbook in front of you, so you're going to have to remember the
content. Now, there are an important two words I want you to remember, in order to
help you remember everything you need to remember. These two words are 'active
recall'. Active recall is the idea of testing yourself in order to help you
remember the content. All of your memorisation techniques that you use to
help you remember the content should be using active recall, otherwise you're gonna
waste loads of time, as it's the most efficient way to remember things. There
are a few ways to use active recall to help you remember the content. My
favourite method is flashcards. Now, with flashcards you have to be careful
because a lot of people fall into the trap of using their flashcards as notes.
People write summaries in notes on flashcards and read back over them. You
may as well just have used a piece of paper, it doesn't make any difference to
how well it goes into your brain: the fact that it's been written on card. You're
just write notes. The way I would recommend laying out your flashcards is
by having a prompt, or a cue, on one side. So, in this case, I have 'the number of
seats the Nazis won in the Reichstag in the May 1928 election'
and then, on the other side, you have an answer - I suppose it's not quite a
question, but it's almost a question - and the answer is 12 seats. Then you can make
lots of these, and have a whole beautiful pack of flashcards, and you can sort them
out by topic. Then, in order to learn the flashcards, you would test yourself, and
then take away the ones that you got right, and go through these ones that you
didn't get right and see which ones of those you've now got right. And then keep
going until you've got them all right, even if it wasn't first time. And then
you can revisit it a day later and, perhaps two days later - whenever you
really feel it's necessary. But, revisit it often enough that you're getting most
of them right after a couple of goes. We also like to point out that that
style of flashcard is what you can find in the description of most of my videos,
in the link to the Quizlet flashcards. They're just not physical flashcards, they're
Quizlet ones. Another wonderful thing you can do with flashcards, is use them to
learn dates. Here, I have a pack of crime and punishment flashcards, which are all
the dates in the front- in that timeline in the front of the history textbook for
crime and punishment. And what you'd do is: you'd have an event on one side - so in
this case I have transportation to North America begins - and then I have the date
that it happened, or the year - 1615. And then you can have a whole pack of
these. Now, a little thing that I like to do, is to go through and have them all
this side up, and see if I can order them like in a big long line on the floor, in
chronological order, and get it right. Obviously, you can line up things that
happened in the same year next to each other - or you can not. But, see if you can
get it right, and then you can go back through and whilst you're checking
whether or not you got it right, you can test yourself on whether or not you got
it right, but also on the dates. And this, I found, is a very, very effective way of
learning dates. You'll be a date ninja after that. However, enough about
flashcards, I'm sure you're sick of them. Perhaps you don't want to use flashcards -
maybe you've decided you're not a flashcard person. There are also other
ways to memorise things, but they have to use active recall -
that's the rule. One of the great revision gods of YouTube, Unjaded Jade, in
a video, described a revision technique which she called blurting, which is the
idea of writing out a fancy mind map, full of everything you need to know, in
whatever chapter of a textbook. And then, covering that up and seeing if you can
recreate that mind map, and then afterwards you can go back and compare.
And you can use, say a different colour pen, to go and add all the things that
you missed, and see if you can remember them next time, which, again, is a form of
active recall. And, I never actually did it myself because I didn't like the idea
of using so many sheets of paper - even though flashcards use lots of sheets of
paper - the idea of having to constantly write things out. Like, I was using my
hands to write enough, as it was, in that period. And, you know, by the end of exam
season, it feels like your wrist is broken - but it might work for you. So, that
brings us on to the third step: application. Application is the process
of applying all the newfound knowledge and content and understanding you have,
to an exam question, in such a way that an examiner is going to give you marks.
A.K.A. doing practice questions so you get good at writing exam questions. There is
a bit strategy to this, however. The first thing I think you should do, is pick
which style of exam question you're going to learn how to do first, because
there's no use trying to learn them all at once. You can move on to the next ones
once you've got the first ones. So, say the four mark features question.
Maybe that's the first one that you're going to learn. What I would suggest you
do is you go and find some example answers of four mark features questions
that have got four marks. And get a highlighter and break them down. See if
you can find a structure - perhaps someone's already given you a structure.
I, for one of the four mark questions, I've got a video out there. And, hopefully,
in the future, I'll have more videos that break down the structure of the exam
questions in a way that's easy to use in the exam. So, the exam structure I would
use in a four mark features question, would be: point, evidence, point, evidence. And
that should get you the four marks. So now you have a structure, it's time to
have a go at actually writing an answer. I would initially suggest that you do these
open-book and don't put a time limit for yourself. And then, have a go at a few of
these, and take them to someone who can mark them.
I'd recommend your teacher, if not, you can have a go at marking them yourself.
And, once you're consistently getting most of the marks - so three or four marks -
then you can think about doing them closed-book, and with a time limit. Then,
obviously, once you've mastered that question type, or at least you've got it
good enough that you're happy with. Time to move on to the next question type, and
repeat the process on and on and on, until you have all the question types
everyone is happy. So there you have it, my "3 steps to revision success".
Thanks for watching, don't forget to Like, subscribe and tell your friends. Yes,
spread the good news The History Channel on YouTube that does GCSE history videos
is actually telling you how to revise GCSE history. Hopefully in a useful
way. It worked for me, so it might work for you, and it might
work for other people as well. I would normally say something useful in this
bit but I don't have anything useful to say because there aren't any Quizlet
flashcards or links to them in the description because this isn't a video
about a specific topic from history. But also, that's what I should say if you're
new to the channel then hello I make GCSE history revision videos and I
animate them most of the time you don't have to look at this face. You get to
look at the the cute one that's on my profile picture. Anyway, I believe
that is all I have to say.
Wesað ġe hāle.