Stress can be a good thing
“... a little bit of stress goes a long way ... it actually does prime us to pay attention to our environment, to think carefully about what’s in front of us, and that plays a role in assessment and evaluation conditions.
“At the other end of the scale, if students are stressed out of their brains, then they can’t think straight. Under those conditions, you’ve got people subject to intrusive thoughts. So, ‘what is this about?’ ‘Did we learn this?’ ‘This is so unfair!’ All of those thoughts going through our conscious minds just get in the road of concentrating and addressing exam requirements.
‘It’s how we interpret that activation - is it ‘This is great, I’m fired up’, or ‘oh God, I’m stressed’. So part of being evaluated is that it’s the mind game, that you play with yourself.”
Don’t have your phone in the bedroom
“Just don’t. People are overusing phones in the bedroom, particularly for alarm clocks. I see it at university level as well and it interferes with people’s sleep. Go back to an old fashioned alarm clock and have the phone outside of the room for goodness sake. It’s a strategy that might have been better to use many months ago, but better late than never… Sleep is absolutely a foundation for effective cognition and also our emotional lives.”
The benefits of exercise cannot be underestimated
“This is not a new insight. The Romans extolled ‘healthy mind, healthy body’. Exercise helps us burn off stress and helps us sleep better. It helps build neural connections in the brain, and in other words, it helps learning. So it has a wide range of benefits.”
Take short rest breaks while studying – but also in the exam
“When we use our conscious minds, or working memories, for learning and problem solving, over time our working memory capacity becomes depleted. With a little bit of rest, we help those resources recover. So if students are doing practice exams in their own time in the lead up, this might be something to practice.”
Consider some kind of meditation practice
“This is not something that is an overnight fix – but better late than never, and there are many, many resources out there including apps. The first that springs to mind is a free one from headspace, but there are other free alternatives out there. The upside is that these practices can help us quiet the mind, they can help us ‘down regulate’ our nervous system, or in other words ‘come down’, ultimately leading to better capabilities to concentrate, including in exam conditions.”
Meditation improves academic performance by boosting focus and concentration, reducing stress and anxiety, and improving short-term memory. PHOTO: Natalie Bond
While taking a break, practise ‘box breathing’ (controlled breathing)
“So the basic idea here is a very systematic breathing cycle, so breathing in for four to six seconds, breathing out for a slightly longer period of time, with a pause in between. When you look at the meditative traditions of a wide range of different religions and philosophies, breath, concentrating on the breath, you just see it again and again. So there’s a good reason for that, because it helps us, again, down regulate the nervous systems and calm down.”
Different rooms to help constructing memorable knowledge
“Do your practise exams in a range of different rooms. When we learn things, if we only learned them in one context, often, what we’ve learned is tied to that particular context. So if students do this study, their exam practice, in a range of different contexts – different classrooms, different rooms in their house - that might be a way of constructing more generalised knowledge, and there’d be more pathways back to the knowledge to help them remember it.”
Concept mapping for more effective and easy knowledge retrieval
“You can do concept maps through computer programs, but I’m a bit skeptical about those, because I suspect that the physical act of drawing on a relatively large canvas like a whiteboard, or a butchers paper, will be a more effective way of constructing a concept map. They have the benefit of engaging the visual part of our mind and the visual part of our mind is very, very important for human cognition. If we can lean in on that visual capacity, then that will be of great benefit.”
Acting things out - the benefits of using your bod
"For drama educators, this will be completely unsurprising to them, but we can use the body to learn, and we can use the body to understand things. So that might involve miming ideas with our hands, or indeed, with our whole bodies. So reading some notes and trying to act it out. This doesn’t only apply to word-heavy subjects, like English or history, but we can apply that in a much broader range of topic areas. I’ve seen studies where scientific text has been given to students, and they’ve been invited to use their hands to help make sense of this text... This might sound bizarre, but what you’re doing is affecting how you’re encoding this information in your long term memory. We encode information in long term memory in a range of different ways, through a range of different senses. As students get older, they tend to use their body less and less for encoding.
“Our education system is focused very heavily on our eyes and our ears, excepting some subject areas like drama education or the visual arts, but mostly we seem to have got out of the habit of using the body to help us learn. If you think about how the ancients learned stuff, and I’m thinking in particular of Australia’s First Nations peoples, they use multimodal learning all the time. Song lines, for example, are acted out, they’re sung out, they’re spoken – it’s a communal form of knowledge. And so we’ve lost something quite important, frankly, about how to learn effectively. The ancients were able to navigate this land without writing, effectively, they were able to survive for tens of thousands of years and passed down this knowledge. So I for one would like to see the body use more in learning.”
Teaching other people or explaining ideas to them
“This is where a parent, or parents, might come into play, or friends, or peer group – so working in study groups and attempting to explain key ideas, key notions, key parts of the syllabus. So what you’re effectively aiming to do is learn by teaching. So if you can explain something clearly from memory, without reference to your notes, then that’s a very powerful learning strategy.”
Testing yourself – but with some actual effort
“So you’ve got your notes in front of you: cover them. You might record yourself using your phone or maybe an iPad, whatever. Try to remember as much as you can and either write it out or speak it out, but you have to try and do it without reference to your notes. Once you’ve tried to remember as much as you can, compare what you were able to remember with what you couldn’t remember, and that will give you a clear signal on what you need to focus more on. Self-testing is a very, very long standing and powerful strategy.”
