Learn how to revise more effectively - and get better GCSE grades!
Our guest blogger is Kit Betts-Masters, Director of Learning Science at Abbeyfield School in Northampton, and the science teacher behind “Gorilla Physics”, a YouTube channel dedicated to helping students get the top grade in their exams. Kit has used Tassomai in his school since 2017 and is a big fan of the program so it made sense for us to support his channel and to invite him to share some tips for exam success.
Tassomai is perfect for helping young people who are looking to get the highest grades at GCSE. On the face of it, Tassomai looks just like any other bank of multiple choice questions. But take a look underneath the bonnet and you find an AI algorithm which is geared to employ the two most effective revision techniques; spaced repetition and interleaving of retrieval practise.
Let’s talk about those two things:
Watch the latest Gorilla Physics video, supported by Tassomai.
Spaced repetition is the idea that you should practise something, leave it for a bit and then practise it again. Seems pretty obvious, I know, but most students don’t do this. The reason for that is because of the way that revision guides are structured. Students tend to pick them up and start at the beginning and work through to the end. What happens is that they cover everything, but they only cover everything once.
Interleaving of retrieval practise is just the idea that they shouldn’t do one topic, then the next, then the next and the next. It’s natural that students want to cover everything in the first topic, then everything in the second topic, and so on. This is intuitively the way you would revise if nobody told you how to do it! However, the evidence says that students should do a little bit of topic one, then a little bit of topic four, then a little bit of topic three and back to topic one again, and so on. They should interleave the topics, doing less of each but more often, repeatedly revisiting them and building up a knowledge of them until they’ve mastered them.
Most schools do these two things, and do them really well, in the classroom. The thing is though that when it comes to independent revision, and students are left alone, they generally revert to the natural, linear way that one would revise.
Tassomai is like a revision guide but it doesn’t start on page one and end on page two hundred. Instead it spaces the repetition and it interleaves the topics. It knows which questions it needs to ask more regularly, because the student gets those wrong more often. It knows which questions the student has actually mastered and which just needs to be revisited in a month’s time, rather than the next day. It builds up a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the student and uses the AI algorithm to tailor a revision programme to the student. All they need to do is turn it on once a day and get their daily goals!
Where this is powerful, and why Tassomai is helpful to get the highest grades in GCSE, is how it’s going to transform each student’s approach to the very hardest questions. You see exam questions are made hard by having more information to process, in order to solve the problem posed by the question. Some of that information will come from the question itself, and some of it will come from the student’s memory. This is the idea of cognitive load theory, in very simple terms; a harder question has more to think about.
In my experience, any student that does at least four daily goals a week on Tassomai gains a massive advantage towards getting the highest grades. Retrieval of the information from their memory becomes so quick and accurate, that they find solving the problem in the question much more straightforward. And because getting the information from their memory is easy, they have much more brain power to deal with the information presented to them in the question.
These students, who get their daily goals, are always working at, and usually much beyond, their target grade.
Kit Betts-Masters
@gorillaphysics on Twitter