7 revision tips to help your child remember

Are you panicking at the thought and sight of all the materials that your kiddo is expected to study to ace the exams? Relax and take a few deep breaths – turns out, there are several ways to train your brain to take in as much information as possible. Check out the 7 best revision tips to help your child remember everything that she has studied.

1. Names before mnemonics

These days, kids are taught to make up mnemonics (sentences based on the initial letters of items to remember) at school. While this method helps them remember the order, the actual names of the items often end up as a fuzzy memory.

Take this as an example: the mnemonic My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Noodles could help you recall the order of planets in the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). But if you did not familiarise yourself with the planets first, you would be having a hard time trying to figure out the names that correspond to those initial letters.

So, it may be worthwhile to start off by learning by heart the names of the items before attempting to get the order right.

2. Repeat, repeat, repeat!

When it comes to revision, the adage ‘Practice makes perfect’ couldn’t be more true. What happens here is that when you repeat a fact or tackle a math problem over and over again, your brain is essentially ‘practising’ to retrieve a memory repeatedly.

So, go ahead and repeat those facts and formulas to yourself – in no time, these will become second nature to you.

3. Timing is everything

According to science, the best time to revise what you’ve learnt is just before you’re about to forget it. And because our memories get stronger the more we try to recall, it is best to space the revision exponentially longer each time. Start off by repeating the things you want to remember after a few minutes, then space it out to a few hours, then a day, then every few days.

This probably explains why your brain does a ‘dump’ after a week of cramming for an exam, causing you to forget everything that you have studied for within the next few weeks.

4. Take regular breaks

We all get tired after a few hours of doing something challenging that uses up our energy stores. This same theory applies to our brain cells as well; when your hippocampus (the part of your brain that works on overdrive when you learn something new) is forced to store a chunk of new information in a short space of time, it can get them jumbled up.

So, do encourage your kids to take short breaks during study time – and get them to revise what they have just learnt before moving on to a new topic.

5. Keep distractions away

It is possible to remember everything that you have studied for, as long as you devote your full attention to the task at hand. When you choose to focus on something, you give it a personal meaning – which makes it easier for you to remember.

For this reason, playing music while revising should not be encouraged, because any speech-like sounds – even at low volume – will shift your focus and use up part of your brain’s attention capacity.

6. Sleep is important

Sleep plays a critical role in helping your memory ‘consolidate’ everything that you have learnt during the day. Much like how you perform a disk defragmentation on your PC’s hard drive, your brain actually backs up short-term patterns and creates long-term memories – all while you’re fast asleep.

What’s more, recent research in Nature Neuroscience has uncovered how memories are organised and irrelevant information deleted during the sleep cycle. This results in the important memories (ones that appear stronger, thanks to repeat revision) becoming easier to access.

7. Find the emotional link

We tend to remember emotionally charged events better, especially if the emotion was a positive one. Although it is not always possible to have warm feelings towards the things that you are revising, you may be able to remember better if you can associate the facts with a visual or emotional experience from the past.

Also, try not to get stressed up, as anxiety uses up your brain power – leaving you with less ‘brain space’ to process and make sense of new information.