On Monday 21 October, Mr Ebbage spoke at an event entitled 'The Psychology of Effective Revision' at Queen Anne's School, as part of its BrainCanDo initiative. Students and parents from Shiplake College, Queen Anne's School, Reading School, Reading Girls School and LVS Ascot were invited to the event and it was encouraging to see a healthy Shiplake representation there.
Mr Ebbage was one of three speakers at the event and he started the evening talking about his views as Assistant Head Academic at Shiplake College, as well as his work on the history of research methods in Psychology. He then took the audience through the research behind effective revision. He discussed the human memory system focusing on working memory and how a knowledge of this can aid students in revising effectively - this means not having distractions (Snapchat!) while revising. Next, he discussed the research into what works and what does not. A now-famous study by Dunlosky et al (2013) found that the methods of 're-reading' and 'highlighting' were most preferred by students but least effective. What does work is practice testing, recall and spaced learning (essentially doing little and often rather than all in one block).
Next, James Paterson, Head of Psychology at LVS Ascot and former UK Memory Champion (that is a real thing!) spoke about memory improvement techniques. This includes the use of visual imagery to improve recall. Mr Paterson demonstrated his ability to recall lots of information such as Pi to 314 decimal places and the 100 most populous countries in order. He then explained how he did this (by turning this information into mental images) while explaining that this is an innate process as humans have evolved to process visual information rather than the written word and how students could apply this to their own learning.
Finally, Ben Stephenson, Director of Sixth Form at Queen Anne's and Sports Psychology lecturer at Reading University, discussed the mental preparation behind revision. He touched on the fact that conditioning is an important part of the process and so revising during the day (which is when the exams will take place) is beneficial. You can also condition yourself to be confident when revising, as picked up by the national press earlier in the year.
A mother of a son from Reading School noted: "As a parent of boys due to sit GCSEs and A Levels next summer, I now feel much better equipped to provide the right kind of revision environment, and support required. I so wish I'd had the benefit of such a lecture before sitting my own A Levels."
Mr Ebbage would like to thank the families who came to support the event and he hopes it was useful. If anyone has any questions about what was presented at the lecture, Mr Ebbage would be more than happy to help and you can contact him at [email protected].
