Balm for revision fever

Here are some articles of research which may help those having to revise for exams and the like.
Lots of things don't really work -even if they make the revisee to feel better about their effort, so in a study about revision techniques only...
"...two strategies -- practice testing and distributed practice -- made the grade, receiving the highest overall utility rating." From this article. The two techniques come down to "spreading out your studying over time and quizzing yourself on material before the big test are highly effective learning strategies"
And, suggesting that where discipline (self-control) is needed, then exposure to 'religious' ideas seems to help muster self-control. I take this to mean that retaining spiritual disciplines like Bible reading in our revision programme could help us overall to keep to the timetables etc that we set ourselves. This seems to me to indicate that maintaining and perhaps even extending our spiritual disciplines including church going is likely to benefit our ability to exercise disciplines helpful to learning.

Now that may be related to why it is that "across all faiths, Erickson's new study found that measures of religious participation and spirituality are positively associated with higher educational attainment".I don't think that this means that going to church (or whatever) would be likely to increase your grade directly, but that the collateral effects of participating in faith communities produces habits and perspectives likely to aid the marshalling of effort effectively and to avoid behaviours that are likely to get in the way of educational attainment. What I would say is that retaining habits of life that 'go with' such attainment is more likely to continue to help.

I'm conscious that sleep and rest are important in my subjective experience and it turns out "this shows up in studies:" "Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," So, in fact, turning in an all-nighter is likely to give you less ability to engage with the demands of study and thinking. I can't help wondering too whether this relates to the phenomenon of stepping away from problems and doing something else which often yields insight to deal with the problem. Sleep in important ("Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory in learning and of course this is a kind of 'gaining life by losing it' paradox in that the 'productive thing to do' is to work as much as possible, rationally. But it turns out if we do that we imperil our learning: we have to rest to allow what learning we have do to consolidate.

One of the factors that helps learning is agency: we learn best when we are in control and making decisions about what we learn and how. "self-directed learning helps us optimize our educational experience, allowing us to focus effort on useful information that we don't already possess and exposing us to information that we don't have access to through passive observation. The active nature of self-directed learning also helps us in encoding information and retaining it over time." (from this article). So revision ought to include agentive opportunities -perhaps by buidling into our timetables acknowledged times to follow up interesting leads (recognising that they may help create further contextual links that will reinforce learning in other areas). Theologically, I'm wondering whether this could link to Adam's critter-naming.

I suspect that in the end, this will turn out to be related to this "They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems." I think that this means problem solving helps and I think this would be in part because in identifying and becoming interested in the problem we exercise agency in relation to it. Though, of course, it's also about gaining enough information and insight about the topic to understand it thoroughly and the latter allows re-applicability. It's higher-order thinking that is enabled and developed. The effect of this on our study habits should be to see whether either we can find problems to solve or even discover them for ourselves: ones we find interesting and want to do (agency again). Adam naming, again?

And this is interesting "Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs" I've written elsewhere about the importance of allowing for failure. What this means in practice can be "obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material" and this can happen in revision when the perceived risk of trying to revise in the light of research and spirituality keeps us in old and established study habits.

The same article suggests "Teachers and parents should emphasize children's progress rather than focusing solely on grades and test scores. Learning takes time and each step in the process should be rewarded, especially at early stages when students most

Recognising a natural need for rest:

researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

See the rest here. Clearly napping and proper sleep at night is good. The latter may need a pre-sleep routine of wind-down, of course, to help stop things whirring around your mind.