GRADE 12 pupils who want to ace their exams have time as their most valuable weapon on their side.
Dale Taylor, head of the programme for the faculty of Social Sciences at the Independent Institute of Education, told SunEducation that later in the year matrics will get plenty of advice on how to best prepare for their exams.
“But most of this advice focuses on last-minute measures. The best way to walk confidently into the exam room, is to make sure that you start preparing to write NOW.”
Taylor said there was a huge difference between studying, which is cramming facts into your head, and preparing, which takes time and strategy, and many people were not aware of the difference.
“True preparation for an exam requires an understanding of concepts in such a way that you are able to engage with them at higher levels. You should be able to analyse them, evaluate them, and create by applying them. The bottom line is that you need to practise, and this often means putting pen to paper, which allows you to think about your knowledge and train your brain to put it into your long-term memory,” she said.
“When studying, you need to make sure that you have not just committed the ideas and facts to memory, but that you understand how they are linked to other concepts and ideas. Parrot-fashion memorising of lists is not going to be enough when writing your final exams,” said Taylor.
Here are two effective ways of learning:
Create presentations
Note down the key words associated with the idea. After reading through and summarising the content, go through the presentation and talk yourself through it, using the key words as focus points and topics for your talk.
In a study group, one person can teach the others using this presentation method.
Creating visual maps
Visual maps let you to record the structure of knowledge in a cycle, a flow chart, a hierarchical or drop-down tree diagram or a Venn diagram.
The choice of map is determined by the content.
By mapping the knowledge visually, you create “tags” of keywords which are much easier to remember than long, complex facts, as well as networks of meaning – or what connects with what?
This lets you comprehend and engage with more complex exam questions.
