I revised mm, honestly, I did loads.

[RomanyQueen]

Is it just me or is it glaringly obvious that kids of year 10 onwards should be able to understand the basics of learning, I'm not talking serious lecture, but just basics to understand you can't revise what you didn't learn.

I've prepared a plan for what I'm doing over the holiday but you know that the plan won't work because they haven't learned how to plan.

I'm not teacher bashing here btw, just as much our responsibility as parents to get this through their skulls.

What do you do, if they just don't see it. You can try and explain even giving good reasons to save time and energy but do they listen.
Nah, it's just mum going on about where learning didn't take place.

Happy summer holidays folks, 2 weeks on Friday, for us, yeh!

I think I get what you mean. Are you talking about content having been taught, but not necessarily been transferred to long term memory at the time? So a topic taught at the start of year 10 is essentially like new when they come to ‘revise’ it in the run up to GCSE.

If so, I think that’s probably changing from a teaching point of view. I’m not sure it’ll change from a listening to parents/teachers point of view.

That's it exactly.
It seems like some kids don't understand they have to do something with the information they are given, to learn the material.
They need to learn it somehow by whatever method is best for that subject. ie. making mind maps in English, but then referring back to them frequently to learn, then final revision has no surprises and is just revising what they already know.

Maybe I expect too much from the kids and it might be a school thing, I'm sure teahers advise the kids to do this though.

My ds cannot make notes or mind maps or access traditional types of revision. He is disorganised partly due to his asd and doesn;t know where to start. Revision guides are never opened.

The most sucess we have had is with Seneca as it is online and interactive and teaches content alongside revising it.

Apart from music theory. He can learn all manner of advanced music theory unaided it appears!

comefrom I may have mentioned this before, but my DD1 has disorganized dyspraxia. I just ended up making all her revision cards myself and doing most revision 1-1 with her. Time consuming, far from ideal, but it worked (mainly).

Unfortunately teen, ds also has mild PDA combined with his asd so will not usually accept any input from me.

Maybe in my case I'll have to do one to one with my dd.
I'm not sure what the answer is in general though, as all the people I hear who are surprised by this every year, don't have dc with additional needs.

Knowledge organisers, self-quizzing and retrieval practice seem to be becoming more popular at the moment so the general problem might sort itself out.

Ds's Knowledge Organisers are completely blank!

What is a 'Knowledge Organiser'?

It's a book/file for each subject in which they are supposed ( I think) to make notes/summarise key points for each topic studied to aid revision. But I might be wrong as ds's is blank despite it often being set as homework.

Ah, thanks.

I've been a (successful) teacher for decades and always performed very well in exams myself, and I don't quite understand quite what you're getting at, OP.
What do you mean by 'not having learned it in the first place'? Generally, students are taught topics, work on them in class and as homework, sometimes do tests or topic assessments, then move onto other topics and eventually revise all the topics for their final exams. I get that some students find things like mind maps more useful than just reading through their notes or doing practice questions, but it sounds like you think there's a whole other stage of the learning process that they are missing out? I revised by reading my notes, testing myself on vocab etc.

I think the OP views this as a 3 step process:

1. be taught something, (and make sure you understand it?)
2. learn it so you do 'know' it, even if you then forget
3. revise it - ie refresh your memory and brush up on the details

Mainly most people when they say 'revise' mean 2&3 combined.
But maybe students don't realise there is a difference between 'learning' and refreshing.

Do kids make notes in class any more? Ds's work seems to be mostly answers to questions in his excercise book or typed as he uses a laptop (without the original question so reading back you don't know what they are, or scraps of photocopied paper. He is terrible at organisation though.

Teen. that's it .

Some kids can see this and others can't. I've had one out of 3 who can see it, and all from different types of school.
He sat night after night going through cgp books, no internet then.
Working until he knew the contents.
Then revision was easy with no big surprises and no missing knowledge.
He wasn't the brightest and got straight C's which he wouldn't have got if he'd missed the middle bit out.

I’m not sure KOs are supposed to be blank!

They’re basically an A4 summary of the main ideas, people or vocabulary in a topic. They’re often presented in a way that makes it easy for pupils to test themselves by covering part of the page.

It’s probably not all that different from making a set of flash cards except in this case it’s provided by the school at this start of a topic.

So the teacher is supposed to provide the summary?

Ds has an expertise book with the title Knowledge Organiser. He had homework that was summarise x topic in your Knowledge Organiser.

He couldn’t do it.

That doesn’t sound quite right, but these things tend to get borrowed and get changed so they aren’t being used for the purpose they were originally intended for.

pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/knowledge-organisers/

classteaching.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/using-knowledge-organisers-to-improve-retrieval-practice/

There are a couple of examples here.

Used in the right way, the concept behind them fits in quite nicely with the point the OP is making. I’m not surprised that pupils might struggle to make one themselves.

Is part of the issue sifting through the vast amount of revision material and resources available. DCs school provide online KOs, revision sheets, quizzes, subscribed online revision apps, in addition to their own class work books and example questions, then there's flash cards,revision books such as CGP and whatever else is available online such as past papers and tutorials on YouTube.

Previously it was a textbook, your own class notes and perhaps some past papers. I just can't help thinking that in some ways this was more straightforward.

That would be much more helpful Rafals

I'm interested to know if anyone had identified a way to work out what sort of revision techniques work best for an individual? (Is there an online test???) DS clearly learns in an entirely different way to me, so everything I suggest he tries to help him revise doesn't seem to work, but we've not really yet worked out what does work, and DS's approach of try something, fail to retain anything, give up, is clearly not a winner long term.

Rafais seems to know what I mean. I do apologise for not being a great communicator It's the dyslexia.

You can only retrieve it from it being there in the first place.

So you are given information via the teacher, and you do something with this during the lesson.

Some kids automatically know to look at this again, and test themselves, until they are secure in their knowledge.

Some kids stuff it in a drawer and forget about it. Maybe have a weak attempt at homework.

Why do some kids see the importance when others don't?
Is it because they don't understand how to learn.

I hope I don't sound stupid now, I do have a PgCE .

I would think that it is the same principle as revising for spelling tests or learning times tables. Some kids are in denial that they have to do lots of repetition to learn, so I guess parents just have to encourage them and show them that it is worth doing. For example - showing them that if they do this for small tests during term time, they end up performing better than if they do not.

It is hard to put in lots of effort, but evidence that it is effective is a great motivator (also removing leisure activities until work is done).

I don’t know whether it’s a case of not getting it. Borrowing from ks1 experience here, but it might still apply, some children need much more practice than others to get info into their long term memory. Some will only need to see a letter/word/number bond once or twice and others will need to see it hundreds. Most will fall somewhere in between.

I wonder whether it’s more a case of children in the middle/bottom of that scale looking at the top and seeing how little practice they need to be able to ‘get it’ and thinking the problem is the technique.

I doubt it helps that in a lot of cases this work has to be done on top of what the school are also setting for homework.